Unknown White Male (2005) on Netflix
PG-1320051h 28mBiographyDocumentary
A man wakes on a Coney Island-bound subway train with no memory of who he is. A hospital tag reads Unknown White Male, and one phone number is his only lead.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb6.5/101,078 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes73%
Trailer
Plot summary
On July 2, 2003, Doug Bruce left his Lower East Side apartment in the evening. Eleven hours later he was riding a New York subway train toward Coney Island with no idea who he was. He wandered disoriented, asked police for help, and ended up in a psychiatric ward with a wrist tag reading Unknown White Male. He could sign his name, but nobody could read it. The only phone number he carried belonged to Eva, who did not recognize him, so she sent her daughter Nadine. Nadine knew him: Douglas Bruce, 37, English, a former stockbroker and photography student, and she took him home. The documentary follows the months in which he relearns the streets, his family and the world, much of it filmed by Doug himself.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Unknown White Male (2005)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Some critics allege the film is an elaborate fraud, which the filmmakers consistently deny. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times initially found the documentary "faintly fishy", but after meeting the filmmakers wrote that he was "convinced of its truthfulness".
- Sceptics point to Bruce's own account: he said it was raining the day he first walked into the police department to report his amnesia, yet days later, choking up, he described a summer storm as the first time he had ever seen rain.
- Before Bruce woke with amnesia and no identification, one of his best friends in Paris had an accident playing soccer, sustained a head injury and woke with amnesia and no identification too, though that case was caused by visible head trauma and lasted only a week.
Stills
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