Netflix has released the official trailer for UNABOMBER, with Jacob Tremblay taking on the dramatically darker role of Ted Kaczynski in a film examining both the making and eventual capture of one of America’s most notorious domestic terrorists.
Directed by Janus Metz, UNABOMBER moves between two different periods in Kaczynski’s life.
The first takes audiences back to 1958.
Ted is just 16 years old when he arrives at Harvard University.
He is extraordinarily intelligent, academically gifted and considerably younger than many of the students around him.
But he is also isolated.
Jacob Tremblay plays this younger version of Kaczynski, years before the bombing campaign that would eventually make the name “Unabomber” known across the United States.
Netflix’s trailer presents him as a brilliant teenager struggling to find his place inside an adult academic environment.
Then he meets Professor Henry Murray.
Russell Crowe portrays the influential Harvard psychologist whose controversial research becomes one of the central elements of the film.
Kaczynski participated in a series of psychological experiments during his time at Harvard, and UNABOMBER explores that period as part of the complicated collection of experiences that shaped his younger life.
The trailer shows Murray challenging and manipulating the students involved in his research while Ted becomes increasingly emotionally isolated.
It is important, however, to distinguish the film’s dramatic exploration from historical certainty.
Kaczynski’s participation in Murray’s experiments is documented, but the extent to which those experiences contributed to his later violence remains debated.
UNABOMBER uses them as one part of a much larger psychological portrait rather than a simple explanation for crimes committed decades later.
Director Janus Metz describes the film as operating across two parallel timelines: the making of the Unabomber and the capture of the Unabomber.
That second storyline takes the film into the 1990s.
By then, investigators have spent years trying to identify the person responsible for a series of bomb attacks delivered through the mail or planted at locations around the United States.
Kaczynski’s real bombing campaign began in 1978 and continued for 17 years.
According to the FBI, his devices killed three people and injured more than 20 others before investigators finally identified and arrested him in 1996.
The investigation became one of the longest and most complex manhunts in FBI history.
Shailene Woodley stars as Joanne Miller, the FBI investigator at the centre of the film’s later timeline.
While the young Ted storyline attempts to understand how an exceptionally gifted student became increasingly alienated from the society around him, Miller’s storyline approaches him from the opposite direction.
She already knows what the Unabomber has done.
Her problem is finding him.
The trailer shows investigators analysing bomb components, written communications and the enormous manifesto eventually submitted by the bomber.
That writing would ultimately become crucial to the real investigation.
In 1995, Kaczynski demanded publication of a roughly 35,000-word essay outlining his opposition to industrial society and modern technology.
The FBI and Justice Department made the controversial decision to allow the manifesto to be published in the hope that someone would recognise its language.
Someone did.
Kaczynski’s brother David became suspicious after comparing the published text with writings from Ted.
Material supplied by the family helped investigators perform linguistic comparisons that eventually contributed to the search warrant for Kaczynski’s remote Montana cabin.
He was arrested there on April 3, 1996.
UNABOMBER appears less interested in simply recreating that famous manhunt than in placing it beside the much less familiar story of Kaczynski’s youth.
That is what originally attracted screenwriters Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves to the project.
Greaves has explained that the idea began after he heard a short radio discussion mentioning that Kaczynski attended Harvard and participated in controversial psychological research there.
Both writers had attended Harvard themselves and began researching that period of Kaczynski’s life.
The resulting screenplay became a story about alienation, intellectual arrogance, isolation and the disastrous decision to embrace violence.
For Tremblay, the film represents one of the most mature transformations of his career.
The actor first became internationally known as a child through his acclaimed performance opposite Brie Larson in Room.
He later appeared in Wonder, Doctor Sleep, Luca and The Little Mermaid before taking increasingly adult dramatic roles.
Metz says Tremblay’s performance in the 2025 film Sovereign convinced him that the actor could carry UNABOMBER.
Tremblay, meanwhile, has said he deliberately avoided approaching Kaczynski as a caricature.
The challenge was portraying a real young person whose future crimes are already known to the audience without pretending that those crimes were inevitable from the beginning.
That creates uncomfortable dramatic tension throughout the trailer.
Viewers know where Ted Kaczynski’s story ends.
The young man on screen does not.
Russell Crowe provides an imposing presence as Henry Murray.
The Academy Award winner plays the professor as an intellectually forceful mentor whose relationship with Kaczynski becomes increasingly disturbing as the experiments progress.
Crowe and Tremblay are joined by Annabelle Wallis as Christiana Morgan, Murray’s academic partner and co-director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic.
The cast also includes Alexander Ludwig, Steven Ogg and Marc Menchaca.
UNABOMBER was written by Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves and produced by Sophie Cassidy for 2.0 Entertainment in association with MRC.
At 1 hour and 38 minutes, the film is structured as a psychological drama and investigative thriller rather than a sprawling true-crime series.
The trailer reflects that approach.
There are no attempts to turn Kaczynski into a criminal mastermind or antihero.
Instead, the footage juxtaposes a deeply isolated teenager with the consequences of the adult he eventually became.
Mail bombs.
Victims.
A massive federal investigation.
A manifesto.
And finally a remote cabin in Montana.
The real Ted Kaczynski ultimately pleaded guilty in 1998 and received life imprisonment without parole.
He died in federal custody in 2023.
Netflix’s film goes back decades before his capture and asks a more difficult question than simply how investigators found him.
How did a gifted 16-year-old mathematics student ultimately become the man they were hunting?
UNABOMBER arrives on Netflix on September 25, 2026.
Watch the official trailer below.
