{"id":659170,"date":"2026-05-22T20:56:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T20:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/659170\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T20:56:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T20:56:09","slug":"netflixs-the-crash-knows-exactly-why-mackenzie-shirilla-is-fascinating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/659170\/","title":{"rendered":"Netflix\u2019s The Crash knows exactly why Mackenzie Shirilla is fascinating."},"content":{"rendered":"

The movie poster<\/a> for today\u2019s No. 1 film on Netflix, The Crash, depicts a car\u2019s side mirror against a pink landscape streaked with passing headlights. Peeking out of the mirror with an enigmatic smile is half the gamine face of Mackenzie Shirilla, a Strongsville, Ohio, high school student and aspiring model and influencer who drove a Toyota Camry into the side of a building at almost 100 mph in 2022, killing her 20-year-old boyfriend, Dominic Russo, and her boyfriend\u2019s friend, 19-year-old Davion Flanagan. The effect of this image is cinematic, evoking a gritty road movie starring some brunette starlet, and confused at least some viewers online, who, unfamiliar with the Shirilla story, thought The Crash was a fictional film rather than a documentary.<\/p>\n

Netflix knows where its bread is buttered. Everyone\u2019s obsessed with the Shirilla case not because it\u2019s especially complex, but because Shirilla is such a uniquely 2020s teen, a potent mix of beautiful and detestable. The documentary, directed by Gareth Johnson and Angharad Scott, brings you up close and personal with Shirilla\u2019s social media, never going long without serving some vertical video showing her worryingly thin body in midriff-baring outfits, her false eyelashes and elaborate makeup, her duckface, her driver\u2019s-seat bong hits, and her preening, sassy captions. Shirilla seems to have been one of those obsessed posters who lack any sense of taste or context. Many such cases, as the man said<\/a>, but not so many where the poster was at such risk of messing up the case for her own innocence.<\/p>\n

Johnson and Scott clearly knew these social media videos had power, as did the prosecutor who played some of them in court when Shirilla went on trial in 2023. In an especially provocative choice, the prosecution tried to prove a lack of remorse by playing a video of the teen posing in a ghoulish Halloween costume before a party, only three months after the crash, looking like the Corpse Bride, waist snatched by a corset to an impossible smallness. \u201cNo amount of protesting from her deluded parents or friends can erase how vile she comes across in her social media posts,\u201d wrote one viewer of The Crash in a Rotten Tomatoes audience review. This strategy also worked for the prosecutor: Shirilla was convicted of murder, felonious assault, aggravated vehicular homicide, drug possession, and possession of criminal tools, and given life in prison, with eligibility of parole after 15 years. Shirilla continues to claim that she blacked out before the crash, and had no intent to kill her passengers.<\/p>\n

This crash had already been the subject of an episode of the HBO show Mean Girl Murders\u2014a much less sober production, featuring cheesy reenactments and interviews with other alums of her school who saw Shirilla as irredeemably toxic\u2014and has been an object of fascination on true-crime YouTube<\/a>. But this Netflix documentary is the first time the imprisoned Shirilla, her parents, and her influencer friend Rosie Graham (almost a million followers on TikTok<\/a>) have gone on camera to recount their version of events. Although in the past week YouTube has exploded with follow-up videos <\/a>to The Crash, arguing that Johnson and Scott left out key pieces of evidence against Shirilla, the documentary is far from kind to this girl. And it\u2019s utter nightmare fuel for parents.<\/p>\n

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The Shirilla family likely wishes they never agreed to participate in The Crash, not least because, after the doc hit Netflix, Shirilla\u2019s father was put on administrative leave<\/a> from his teaching job. The doc didn\u2019t break the news that the couple let their 13-year-old daughter start a relationship with a 17-year-old, and later let her move in with that boyfriend while she was still in high school, but it did disseminate that information to a much, much wider audience. Shirilla\u2019s father, looking like Jon Stewart\u2019s long-lost brother and wearing an ill-chosen T-shirt with the word \u201cBoom!\u201d on it in comic-book font, defensively admitted that he didn\u2019t mind Mackenzie smoking weed. \u201cI don\u2019t have a problem with her smoking dope,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you\u2019re going to smoke a drug, that\u2019s the one I believe you should take.\u201d In a follow-up interview with TMZ<\/a>, where he claimed Netflix took the comment out of context, Shirilla sort of clarified that he didn\u2019t \u201callow\u201d his daughter to smoke weed, but also hadn\u2019t stopped her: \u201cI couldn\u2019t lock her up in her room.\u201d Shirilla\u2019s mother said Mackenzie didn\u2019t \u201cneed much discipline,\u201d and that she always trusted her daughter\u2019s testimony when she was accused of bullying at school\u2014clearly, a mother clinging to an ingrained narrative about her daughter\u2019s good character, long after she should have realized this was a child in trouble.<\/p>\n

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On the other hand, Davion\u2019s bereaved father, Scott Flanagan, a steady, rational on-screen presence, has developed a minor fandom. A few days after the crash, with Mackenzie\u2019s following growing as she posted from the hospital, Shirilla and her mother corresponded with a brand who reached out via Instagram comment for a collaboration, responding with a bland, eager positivity that\u2019s shocking to read, given the context. Flanagan said, \u201cNobody in their right mind would post about being thrilled about an opportunity after they\u2019d just killed two people\u201d\u2014the audience\u2019s exact thoughts. On X, the singer Cardi B <\/a>shared a screenshot of Flanagan and commented<\/a>, \u201cLove him. He does not play!\u201d<\/p>\n

Is the growing obsession with Shirilla, fueled by this new documentary (as one person who said they believe in Shirilla\u2019s guilt argued on X<\/a>), misogyny directed toward a teen girl doing the things teen girls now do? In her interviews, where she acts as a sort of character witness for her friend, Rosie Graham tells the documentarians that the Halloween 2022 corpse makeup was just a homage to Playboi Carti<\/a>, and tries to explain to older viewers that Shirilla\u2019s videos shouldn\u2019t be used against her, saying that they don\u2019t understand the pace of the internet. Graham herself, she says, posts so many times a day, it\u2019s hard to remember the details. \u201cYou cannot use that against her,\u201d Graham argues. What the reaction to The Crash shows is that people will absolutely, definitely use that against her. They already have.<\/p>\n

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