Review: Soaked In Bleach

Coming weeks after the widely praised Montage of Heck, Soaked in Bleach presents a different focus on the mythology of Kurt Cobain...his death. Taking a more crime recreation angle, this documentary spends little time about Nirvana's rise. It instead bases its entire thesis on a series of taped phone calls and in person meetings between private investigator Tom Grant and Cobain's wife at the time Courtney Love.

The evidence the filmmakers and Grant bring forth suggest that Cobain could not have possibly pulled the trigger of a shotgun on the amount of heroin in his system. They also paint the Seattle Police Department as conspirators in an indirect way. The film's thesis is a little bit messy, like a shotgun blast of speculation. Some of it hits hard and some doesn't but the film's goal is in trying to get the case reopened. In that mission, I think the filmmakers are very successful.

I for one am not fully convinced but felt that the case presented was compelling and worth my time. The biggest issue in the film is that it cuts back and forth between the kind of B-level recreations and the actual tapes Grant has. When you hear Love say some damning things, the film is at its strongest. Too many times though the film gets lost in these recreated scenes and it is hard to know if everything being presented is unfiltered. Love comes off as a monster with absolutely no attempt to present her as an innocent or even a caring person.

This is the kind of movie you need to see with someone and have a drink afterwards. Soaked in Bleach presents an alternative narrative to the death of a rock icon. It does so convincingly and will no doubt spark hours of conversation. While some of the acting in the recreations feels more like a caricature than a real performance, the film does present some hard evidence that Cobain was not suicidal and his death not self-inflicted.

3/5