Unknown Number: The High School Catfish
Unknown Number: The High School Catfish
6.785%69%
A teen girl and her boyfriend face persistent harassment from an unknown caller. Police investigating the months of torment discover a revelation that upends their initial assumptions.
LivewireAdmin reviewedSeptember 7, 2025
There’s a taut, unsettling pulse to this documentary: the typing bubbles, the clipped late-night voice notes, the cascading screenshots of texts that start somewhat tame and curdle into manipulation. Just like I'm sure many others out there, my TikTok algorithm really wanted me to watch this one. As a formal exercise, it’s sharp—cleanly edited and empathetic to the kids and families who got swept up in a lie that metastasized. The film is at its best when it slows down and lets victims narrate the incremental boundary-pushing that makes catfishing so insidious; you can feel the dread accumulate scene by scene.
But I left frustrated—and not just by the story’s ugliness. Like too many modern true-crime docs, this one soft-pedals the confrontation that matters most. The perpetrator appears just enough to give the film an air of balance, then seems wrapped in bubble-wrap: carefully framed, lightly challenged, seldom pressed. You can sense the calculus—if the filmmakers push harder, access evaporates—but trading accountability for access leaves a hollow center. The crucial follow-ups never come. Why these targets? How did they rationalize the harm? What specific lies were crafted to breach trust? When answers hedge, there’s no real pushback; when responsibility is deflected, the filmmakers feed excuses instead of digging in.
I’m not asking for cruelty or gotcha theatrics, but for principled, probing questions—the kind that clarify intent, establish patterns, and honor the people who were hurt by insisting on clarity. A stronger third act would have laid out the specific legal consequences and examined platform responsibility with specificity. As is, the movie vividly re-creates the harm while letting the harm-doer glide past the hardest truths. When the "twist" in the doc comes into focus, it becomes pretty clear that the filmmakers were more interested in telling a story over probing for motives.
Still, the craft is assured, the pacing lean, and the survivors’ voices are presented with care. It’s an effective conversation starter about online vulnerability in high school and elsewhere—just not the accountability document it could (and should) be.