A Filmmaker's Review: "Attacking the Devil" (2014, Netflix)

Never in my life have I seen a documentary that not only carried emotional trauma of the young with it, but also carried the historical trauma of the old as well. Here we have the heartbreaking story of the children of thalidomide and exactly why their cases had gone forgotten even though they wanted answers ever since day one.

The documentary starts off by showing us the what and why. We see that we can answer the ‘why’ question very well. Why was this drug used in the first place? Once we understand this, then we can move on to the ‘what’. What was this drug doing first and foremost? As of yet, the audience are not aware of what it does to the children, we are only aware of what it does to the parent. This proves an effective way to start the documentary because I don’t think a lot of people are like my father who used to tell me about these children when I was younger almost indispensably and so, a lot of the ‘what’ and ‘why’ has at least been forgotten to history. Establishing the historical ground is very important.

Then we have the ‘how’ and this is where it involves the children being born. At first, it is believed to be only a coincidence but after many, many cases start cropping up, it is sure to be some sort of pattern involving the medications. The documentary also goes over the fact that the numbers are skewed since they aren’t aware exactly how many children were actually suffocated by the nurses upon birth because of their deformities. This is a strange thing for a documentary to go through because no matter how harsh the subject, I’ve mostly seen skewed numbers left out of it. The fact that this documentary is going straight for it means that it is here to make a very definite point.

The next question we get answered is the ‘what now’. We get the involvement of a newspaper and investigative journalism that wants to help these parents and exactly what they did for them. We get the millions of pounds at stake and we get these trying times where the parents are left with very little reassurance from the justice system. However, the investigative journalism part of it seems to be making a very clear point that the power of the media is a strong thing and can help in these times of need.

It is again that we return to the historical context but in a different way. This time it involves the nazis and the war. Not only do we have the pain that the children are experiencing here, we also have the frustration of the parents being miss-sold something that would’ve apparently helped them, but now we have the horrors of the war to put on top of it. It is clear that not only is this a great way to elicit one of the biggest emotional responses out of the documentary but it is a great way of seeing that we get the entire picture and that absolutely nothing is left out.

When we return to the court cases and the money question, we get an overwhelming amount of heartbreaking information. A man has his daughter taken away from him and the majority of the parents of these children end up losing the money that was initially promised to them.

When the man gets his child back we see an obvious climb up that we are told from the start, would happen. Here we have the classic ‘are we there yet’ question answered. It is the question that sparked the entire documentary in the first place. The investigative journalist section of the newspaper reports on the fact that the families are now about to receive more money for their loses and we get the sense as well that the world of journalism and media has really changed forever. In the big scope of things since this event has pretty much been lost to 20th century history in the shadow of wars, you really can’t imagine why more people don’t know about this. So much changed in such a small space of time. But not only that, it also teaches us that the best way to make a documentary is to answer all the essential questions.