The new trailer for Netflix’s UNABOMBER turns one of the darkest chapters in modern American crime into a psychological thriller, with Russell Crowe, Jacob Tremblay and Shailene Woodley at its center. Crowe arrives in particularly intriguing territory here, following a career that has moved comfortably between historical epics, psychological dramas, action thrillers and morally complicated characters, from Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind to The Pope’s Exorcist and Land of Bad.

There is something fitting about Crowe stepping into a story where intellect itself becomes ominous.

Netflix has released the first full trailer for UNABOMBER, and it immediately makes clear that this is not being shaped as a conventional cat-and-mouse crime movie. The trailer opens in 1994 with the aftermath of a deadly mail bombing before rewinding to 1958, when Ted Kaczynski was still a 16-year-old Harvard prodigy. Jacob Tremblay plays the young Kaczynski, while Russell Crowe portrays Harvard psychologist Henry Murray, whose controversial psychological experiments become one of the film’s most unsettling narrative threads. Shailene Woodley plays FBI agent Joanne Miller, the investigator pursuing Kaczynski decades later.

Crowe also has a particular relationship with the streaming era. His filmography has never been confined to one genre, and Netflix has given several of his projects fresh streaming lives, including The Pope’s Exorcist, while Land of Bad also found a substantial audience on the platform. UNABOMBER feels like a more cerebral extension of that territory, trading battlefield command centers and supernatural horror for interrogation rooms, academic psychology and the mechanics of a decades-long investigation.

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Crowe may be arriving from the world of exorcisms and military operations, but UNABOMBER moves him into a far more cerebral battlefield, one where the most dangerous weapons are ideas, memory and psychological manipulation. That shift becomes even more compelling when the story pulls back from Crowe’s character and begins tracing the real history that made Kaczynski one of the FBI’s most notorious targets.

The film takes its unusual route through Kaczynski’s story by moving between two timelines. One follows his formative years at Harvard and his increasingly troubled relationship with society, while the other follows the FBI investigation that eventually brought the Unabomber into focus. Director Janus Metz has described the structure as essentially the making and capture of the Unabomber, placing the personal history beside the institutional hunt.

Crowe’s role is especially interesting because Henry Murray is not simply another authority figure in the story. Netflix describes him as the professor who subjects Kaczynski to a series of controversial psychological experiments, creating a disturbing connection between the brilliant student and the academic studying him. The trailer gives Crowe a measured, almost hypnotic presence, with Murray telling Kaczynski that there is something special about him before delivering the ominous line, “Ideas are like fire.” It is a character built for the kind of controlled intensity Crowe has frequently brought to psychologically loaded material.

UNABOMBER premieres exclusively on Netflix on September 25, 2026. The trailer suggests Netflix is approaching the material more as a disturbing examination of how a brilliant young mind became capable of extraordinary violence.

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What do you think of Russell Crowe’s role and the first trailer for UNABOMBER? Share your thoughts in the comments.