Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Enemies of the State’ on VOD, a Crazy-Complicated Documentary Covering Government Conspiracies, Child Porn and the Nature of Truth

Enemies of the State — now on VOD — opens with an Oscar Wilde quote: “The truth is never pure and rarely simple.” Consider that a warning, because the more questions director Sonia Kennebeck asks about subject Matt DeHart, the more questions she turns up. It’s a documentary like a crazy rural road trip — it winds and twists and turns and hopefully you know where you are at the end.

ENEMIES OF THE STATE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Matt DeHart was always in front of the computer, “playing his war games,” his mother, LeAnn, says in an old home movie. He’s profiled as a bit of a weirdo, a high schooler who wore a trenchcoat, had friends act like his “secret service” when he ran for student council president, and, when he lost the election, hid a dead fish in the ceiling of the council office. He also had a “computer club” dubbed KAOS, which maybe explains exactly what kind of computer club it might be. His dad, Paul, met LeAnn in the Army, where they were both linguists; the family moved around a lot, and when Paul was offered an early retirement package, he took it, joined the seminary and became a minister. Matt eventually followed in his parents’ footsteps and joined the National Guard, where he worked as an intelligence analyst until he was honorably discharged due to his struggles with depression.

The DeHarts sure seem like a TOTALLY NORMAL FAMILY, except we soon see a re-enactment of them packing up their essentials in the middle of the night and seeking asylum in Canada. Matt was a dabbler in the dark web. He was affiliated with the activist hacker group Anonymous, and hosted a server for Julian Assange’s infamous Wikileaks organization. He says he received a highly sensitive government document, followed by a warning from a hacker colleague that the feds were coming. He deleted his website and dumped the files on a flash drive. The FBI raided his house, carrying a warrant citing him for possessing child pornography, alleging that he had groomed minors into sending him explicit video of themselves. But Matt says that’s not what they were REALLY after, and Paul and LeAnn assert the same, going so far as to encourage him to run away to Mexico, schlepping him to Canada and trucking him to the Russian and Venezuelan embassies in D.C. to seek asylum.

What follows is a tangle of testimonials: From Paul and LeAnn, who insist they’re being constantly watched and bugged by the U.S. government as it tries to railroad their son with false child-porn charges. From lawyers representing the DeHarts, some less sympathetic to Matt’s claims than others. From a detective with the FBI’s cyber crime task force and the assistant U.S. attorney on the child-porn case. From a college professor who’s an expert on Anonymous. From a National Post reporter who profiled DeHart, and says “I didn’t quite realize at (the beginning) how bizarre, how twisting and turning and complicated the story would really be.” You said it, buddy — there’s a story about Matt being drugged and tortured by the FBI, and one about the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, an entire narrative about how Matt became associated with whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, and also some strong arguments that he’s a vile child pornographer. Who are the credible voices here?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Enemies in the State exists somewhere between Oscar-winning Snowden profile Citizenfour and Capturing the Friedmans. Kennebeck also seems to specialize in whistleblower docs — 2016’s National Bird, which profiles three military vets involved in the U.S. military’s “secret drone war,” and 2021’s The U.S. vs. Reality Winner.

Performance Worth Watching: Paul and LeAnn come off as concerned, loving, devoted parents who are also kooks.

Memorable Dialogue: One of DeHart’s long chain of lawyers and who happens to be the slipperiest of them all, utters this all-too-true doozy: “The only way to make the facts of this case is to entertain some kind of wild conspiracy theory.”

Sex and Skin: None. TFCTF: Too F—-ing Confused To F—-.

Our Take: After all this — and there’s much more than what’s outlined above, so much more — one can conclude that life on Earth is impossible and that we are constantly deluding ourselves when we try to make orderly sense of it. Have a nice day.

On a quest to tell a story with almost zero objective clarity to it before she even turns on a camera, Kennebeck makes some interesting choices: One, she uses reenactments to tell parts of the story, using dialogue from transcripts or having actors lip-sync to legit audio recordings from hearings — and she’s utterly transparent about all of it, no deepfake tech or fudging here, although there’s a clearly staged scene near the end in which Matt and his parents play Scrabble that really needs to go. Two, she chops up the timeline, making an already crazy-convoluted narrative even more complicated. And three, she kind of deemphasizes the child-porn part of the story, perhaps because it’s more cut-and-dried, for the government conspiracy fodder.

So Enemies of the State is equal parts fascinating and frustrating. The former, because what Kennebeck is trying to get at here isn’t the ultimate truth about Matt DeHart, but rather, the idea that the only existing certainty is uncertainty. The latter, because Kennebeck obfuscates the film’s message somewhat by further muddying an already murky narrative with techniques devised to make the documentary more interesting. A straightforward approach might’ve worked better, removing a layer of unreality from a story that’s already treading truth-is-stranger-than-fiction territory. It takes some active viewing, but leaning toward the screen to parse a detailed narrative is always better than leaning back and dozing off.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Enemies of the State could be tighter and cleaner. But the ins and outs of DeHart’s story, and Kennebeck’s quest for something greater than the mere facts, renders the film worth a watch, as long as nobody expects anything even remotely resembling dramatic closure.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream Enemies of the State