If we’re all currently leaning into the pile-on phase against Netflix, the true-crime doc remains perhaps the only untouchable bread and butter for the content giant. While profits are down, it’s still a boom-time for programs that take you down the rabbit hole of serial killers, scammers, scandals, and the like (and that probably won’t change, considering how cheap they likely are for Netflix and how reliably well they do). Most of these series and films are not exceptionally well-made, but the material tends to be juicy, if morally ambivalent, enough. Few, though, have covered the kind of unique horror that is at the center of the new Netflix doc Our Father.
The new film follows the story of Don Cline, a prominent fertility doctor in Indianapolis who, over the course of decades, repeatedly used his own sperm to artificially inseminate dozens upon dozens of women — all of whom were told they were receiving either anonymous donor samples or their own partner’s. The truth comes out much later, and gradually, as the rise of technology like 23andMe allows Cline’s biological children — 91 half-siblings and counting, who are all well into adulthood and united by this new reality — to begin to put the pieces together.
