Netflix’s Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story is the latest entry in the streaming service’s polished true-crime catalog, and like so many before it, it draws you in with careful craft and a sense of moral purpose—only to leave you with the queasy sense that something’s missing.
The series is stark, methodical, and thankfully avoids the genre’s worst instincts. There are no cheap dramatizations, no ominous reenactments, no gothic voiceovers trying to outdo the horror.
Instead, it leans on archival news footage, survivor testimony, and newly unearthed police recordings. These tools make the story feel chillingly immediate. For those unfamiliar with the case, it’s shocking. For those who know it well, it still unsettles.
But what British Horror Story gains in tone, it loses in shape. The pacing feels off, as if the filmmakers couldn’t decide whether to create a portrait of evil or a procedural of how it was uncovered.
The result is a story that feels suspended in midair—gripping while it plays, but evaporating the moment it ends.
Worse, it omits major players like Anne Marie Davis, Fred West’s daughter and a central witness in Rose’s prosecution. The documentary never mentions her, a baffling gap that undercuts its claim to telling the full story. It also closes without context—no text, no follow-ups, no “where are they now” summation. The series doesn’t so much end as stop.
There’s power in restraint, yes. But not in absence. And this case—like all serial murder cases—is as much about survival and aftermath as it is about horror.
Fred and Rose West succeeds in bringing dignity to the victims and restraint to the genre. But its refusal to fully close the circle robs it of the resolution its viewers, and its subjects, deserve. It’s a good documentary. It just needed to be great.
