In 2015, video clips started to appear online, in which two children made a series of horrific allegations of sexual and physical abuse against parents and teachers at their school in north London, said Daniel Keane in the Evening Standard.
"They claimed the abuse was all part of a Satanic ritual which also involved the killing of babies and drinking of their blood." Police found no evidence of wrongdoing, but the videos "spread like wildfire", fuelling conspiracy theories that refused to die, even when it emerged that the children had been coerced into making false allegations by their abusive stepfather. This "excellent" Channel 4 documentary tells the story of the fallout from the hoax through the eyes of four mothers at the school. They are played by actors, who lip-sync the mothers' voices, which makes it feel a bit "clunky"; but it's still a "compelling story, brilliantly told".
"This isn't elegant filmmaking," said Rachel Cooke in The New Statesman: "the storytelling tips towards the sensational." But it is "gripping", and director Emily Turner even manages to interview Sabine McNeill, the virulent and unrepentant troll who was eventually sentenced to nine years for stalking the parents.
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"The basic story" here "is an ancient one", said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian: "a witch-hunt, but one enabled in terrifying ways by online connectivity". And it made me wonder: "who benefits from the undermining of facts, from the destabilisation of truth? And, above all, where is the internet's off switch?"
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