Eroll Morris's "A Wilderness of Error" is a Piece of Shit

Errol Morris is often hailed as one of the great documentarians of our time, a director known for his stylish interrogation of complicated truths. Yet his treatment of the Jeffrey MacDonald case in A Wilderness of Error reveals not a bold investigator, but a stylist preoccupied with atmosphere at the expense of substance.

At first glance, Morris’s documentary appears to offer a thoughtful reconsideration of a tragic case: a Green Beret doctor accused of brutally murdering his pregnant wife and two young daughters in 1970. Beneath the surface, however, the work is little more than a calculated rehashing of long-settled facts — dressed up with mood lighting, cryptic narration, and the hollow theater of ambiguity.

The essential failure of A Wilderness of Error is that it asks the wrong question. Morris frames the story around procedural irregularities and judicial missteps, treating these as though they call MacDonald’s guilt into serious question. But guilt and procedural fairness are not the same thing.It is possible — and in this case, likely — that Jeffrey MacDonald was guilty of the murders, even if the legal process at times failed him.

By focusing obsessively on systemic flaws, Morris obscures the far more compelling psychological reality: the pathology of a man who could brutally annihilate his family and spend the following decades maintaining a self-serving fantasy of innocence. If you assume, correctly, that MacDonald is guilty, the story becomes extraordinarily rich and terrifying — a study in narcissism, control, and self-delusion. If you assume he is innocent, it is merely a story of bureaucratic failure — important, perhaps, but psychologically flat.

Morris’s documentary ignores this crucial distinction.Instead, he offers only a mood: moody reenactments, ominous silences, the endless suggestion that "something doesn’t add up," without daring to confront the overwhelming evidence that MacDonald is, in fact, guilty.

Nor does Morris bring new evidence to light.He simply reworks old factoids, layering them with production gloss but adding nothing substantial to the record that Joe McGinniss had already assembled decades earlier in Fatal Vision — a book that, in contrast to Morris’s documentary, allows the facts to speak for themselves without editorialized ambiguity.

Ultimately, A Wilderness of Error is not a documentary about truth.It is a documentary about a director's aesthetic — a performance of investigative inquiry, not an act of inquiry itself.

The real tragedy is not that Morris misleads his audience.It is that by pretending the case remains a grand unsolved mystery, he blocks access to the far deeper psychological horror that lies at its center:the terrifying fact that a man can murder his entire family without apparent remorse, and then successfully pass himself off as a victim for decades.

In the end, Errol Morris doesn't clarify reality.He obscures it — and worse, he prettifies it — turning real suffering into just another stylish backdrop for his tired documentary tricks.