Spacey Unmasked, review: a sober, unsensational and relentless spool of allegations

Several days before Spacey Unmasked (Channel 4) was broadcast, Kevin Spacey posted his own review of Channel 4’s two-part investigative documentary on X (formerly Twitter).

“I will not sit back and be attacked by a dying network’s one-sided ‘documentary’ about me in their desperate attempt for ratings,” he said. “There’s a proper channel to handle allegations against me and it’s not Channel 4.”

It doesn’t sound like he watched it. Perhaps that’s understandable, given that Spacey Unmasked is a relentless spool of allegations from men saying how Spacey was (among other things) “the devil”. But whatever the merits of the allegations made, there was nothing desperate about Kira Phillips’s two films.

Spacey Unmasked certainly doesn’t feel like a sensationalist witch hunt: it is stressed from the outset that in a British court last year Spacey was found not guilty of all charges of sexual assaults against four men between 2001 and 2013. None of the men speaking here were involved in those trials. It also reports a civil trial verdict in America, one that found that Spacey did not sexually abuse Anthony Rapp, then 14, while both were relatively unknown actors in Broadway plays in 1980s.

In addition, the documentary tries to interweave stories from Spacey’s childhood to at least grant some kind of understanding as to why he might have grown up to be brilliant, shape-shifting, magnetic, predatory. (Spacey’s father, his estranged brother Randy claims, was a violent abuser; unfortunately Randy, a Rod Stewart impersonator with a Liberace dress sense, does not come across as the most reliable witness.)

Spacey, we know, was offered a right to reply by Channel 4 (though his fulminations on X show he felt he wasn’t given enough time). The actor has since had his own say in a long interview with the former GB News presenter Dan Wootton, in which he again denies all of the allegations. On X, he has described Phillips’s work as a “crocumentary”.

Really though, the programme is almost overwhelmed by the volume and tenor of the testimony. To say it is repetitive television is not, in this case, a reproof. The repetition just established that there was a pattern to Spacey’s behaviour throughout his life, one that involved abuse of power at every stage. It may be, of course, that the documentary was wilfully edited to make it look like that, interviews spliced and diced with sly intent. Or it may be – Ockham’s razor and all that — that there just was a pattern.

At the very least, the manner of the telling is so sober and dutiful that it could never be called a ratings grab. It is, instead, numbing in its gradual accumulation.

If we’ve learned anything from MeToo it is that distended power dynamics lead to abuse and contempt. But that it’s very hard to say something when your boss, your gatekeeper and your tormentor are all the same person.

It makes it all the more impressive, therefore, that a large part of Spacey Unmasked is given over to the victims. The pattern to their behaviour was that, to a man, they all blamed themselves for what Spacey did and have felt ashamed ever since. Spacey, therefore, might be right in his indignant tweets – this documentary was one-sided. But it was on the side of the victims, and they, surely, are the ones who deserve a hearing.

Both episodes of Spacey Unmasked are on Channel4.com now