It is technically easy to make a film about Molly Russell because, even though she died by suicide at just 14, she spent her life as part of the most documented generation in history. We still have the photographs and messages she sent to friends – the note saying “Sisters for life!”, the two laughing emojis sent the day before she died – all screenshotted and preserved. We can read what she posted and saw on the internet: “Harry Potter is life” and “I just want to be pretty”. There are videos her parents made of her, singing songs by Emeli Sandé on stage at school. And the videos she made of herself, her face framed by the puppy filters that were all over Snapchat in the year of her death, 2017.
This is a peculiar generational distinction. Previous waves of teenagers got blue jeans and rock music and disposable incomes. We (I am only four years older than Molly would have been today) got unprecedented levels of self-exposure. It would be convenient to say I remember what it was like to use social media as a teenager, in what we now regard as a bizarre unplanned sociological experiment, but I can’t. So quick was the rush to download, participate and transmit that very rapidly these spaces became more like an alternate reality than a pastime. Trying to remember the hours wasted is like trying to remember a daily commute carried out for years – it was everyday, and every day.
But that means the raw footage is plentiful. Molly was recorded and monitored for most of her adolescence, particularly after she downloaded Instagram and Pinterest. These apps function by tracking their “users” (drugs and social media – those are only times people become “users”) and supplying them with the content that will keep them using. It is the view of this documentary, and of Molly’s father, Ian, whom it follows closely, that these platforms and the content they supplied Molly are what led to her death.
Scripted by Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, this is a film with an argument. Though clearly afflicted by the ordinary unhappiness of adolescence, the algorithms Molly encountered online followed an inhuman mechanism, feeding her content that echoed her unhappiness until it became unbearable. But the story of why and how those algorithms exist is told in a global and economic sweep, taking in the rise of Silicon Valley, Big Tech, and those beaming, squirmy characters of Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and Nick Clegg.
A grand and corporate story is therefore told in an expensive and grandiose way. ChatGPT – or something very like it – appears throughout as a disembodied narrator. The inquest around Molly’s death is recreated by actors, who speechify inside a glass cube, a form of staging you’d normally only expect on the boldest frontiers of the West End. Molly’s empty bedroom is reimagined as a strange, virtual space, where we see a silhouette of Molly, faceless. The cast quickly becomes international, involving repentant software engineers like Arturo Béjar and Lotte Rubæk, who resigned from advising Meta over their failure to regulate the content young women were seeing. The most moving moments, though, come from Molly’s campaigning father, who seems dedicated and traumatised, and her friends. They see her death as accidental yet universal – it could have been them.
Could it have, though? This documentary presents Molly Russell as an illustrative story of our age, a victim of vast impersonal forces that came crashing down upon her – a teenaged Jade Goody. Hence the intercuts of undersea cables and circuit boards alongside the ghostly images of the deceased girl. But, despite the presence of friends and family, she still feels absent. We know she was an apparently happy girl, that she loved musicals, that she’d just got the lead role in a school production of Fantastic Mr Fox. Depression and distress can often be invisible. But the motions of her mind, the connection between her “feed” (another dehumanising giveaway, that word) and her fate feels unresolved. As does what we do in response: Ian Russell recently came out against social media ban for under-16s, though he supports the existing Online Safety Act. In the meantime, a new and experimental form of capitalism continues to feel its own. And to families like the Russells, we cannot truly offer help or explanation.
Molly vs the Machines
Channel 4
[Further reading: Visiting Sandringham, Andrew’s stately hideaway]
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This article appears in the 25 Feb 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Crumbling Crown
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