The current most popular movie on Netflix is a true-crime documentary exploring an incident that might not even be a crime, and behaviors more nebulous than the law was ever prepared to adjudicate.
“The Crash” tells the story of Mackenzie Shirilla, a 17-year-old who in July of 2022 drove a car containing two passengers into a brick wall outside of Cleveland at more than 100 mph. Dominic Russo — who was Mackenzie’s boyfriend — and their friend Davion Flanagan were pronounced dead at the scene. Mackenzie, suffering multiple fractures, survived. But she was later arrested, tried and convicted of felonious assault and murder by a judge who ruled in a bench trial that the crash was premeditated and that Mackenzie represented “hell on wheels.” Her appeals have thus far been denied, and she remains in prison today.
Mackenzie has become somewhat of a cause célèbre on social media, where couch detectives delight in disassembling and reassembling her case, combing through troves of text messages, old social media posts and snippets of telephone conversations, some of which were a part of the original trial and some of which were simply a part of the ephemera of an online life, the flotsam left behind when you are 17 and TikTok is the altar you build for the religion of yourself. “The Crash” is about an alleged crime, but it is also about the inner lives of teenagers. What they understand of life and death, or don’t, and what the adults around them understand, or don’t, about them.
In terms of the car crash itself: Mackenzie’s supporters believe her story that she has no memory of it. In the documentary she speculates that she blacked out due to postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, a medical condition that causes fainting and dizziness, with which she says she was diagnosed in 2017 (no medical experts testified on her behalf at trial). To believe that she intentionally killed her passengers requires believing that she was also planning to die herself, but friends and family say she had never mentioned suicide and that she had made plans for both the near and distant future.
On the other hand, prosecutors argued that the car’s brakes were never employed, even as the vehicle raced toward the wall, and that a curve in the road would have been difficult to execute if the driver was blacked out. They suggested that Dominic had been trying to end their relationship, and that Mackenzie’s social media behavior after the crash beggared belief — a series of posts that were tone deaf at best and sociopathic at worst, appearing to mock the deaths of Dominic and Davion.
I have no idea exactly what happened inside the Toyota Camry in 2022. None of us do. While “The Crash” is fairly evenhanded, two other made-for-TV treatments, which I haven’t seen, apparently lean more toward guilt. But what does seem clear to me is that large parts of this case have had very little to do with the events of July 2022, and that part of what was on trial was teenagehood itself.
Mackenzie is not, shall we say, a sympathetic figure. An aspiring model and influencer, her followers peaked in the aftermath of the crash as she made TikToks from her hospital room and posted footage of herself attending a concert while still in a wheelchair. Shortly after the crash she was somehow contacted by a clothing company for a brand partnership, and reacted with enthusiasm that seemed unbecoming (And so, frankly, did her mom, an overly permissive parent who on multiple occasions in this documentary seems like she needs her motherboard taken in for a tuneup). She appeared to dress as a corpse for Halloween.
But throughout “The Crash,” I found myself wondering whether the people passing these judgments had ever spent much time around teenagers. Whether they remembered being the kind of person who would declare, over a minor annoyance, that they were ready to “kill someone.” Whether they were fully aware that the planet occupied by 17-year-olds is radically different than the one they spend time on. Whether their loathing of Mackenzie — who, again, comes across as thoughtless and clueless, not to mention perpetually stoned — was partially a terrified reaction to the fact that this teenage girl, and maybe all teenage girls, are total aliens.
While law enforcement officials react with disgust over a social media post in which Mackenzie labels herself “the girl you die for,” her friends in the documentary patiently explain that the post was Mackenzie participating in a viral, mindless trend of dancing to a particular Marina song lyric. “I post five to seven TikToks a day,” one friend offered by way of comparison. “At that rate I don’t even remember what I posted yesterday.”
In reference to the photos of Mackenzie appearing to dress as a corpse — a “shocking lack of remorse,” as the prosecution had dubbed it — another friend, pictured in identical costume, flatly corrects: “We were dressed as [American rapper] Playboi Carti. I think most people my age know that.”
You could argue that the time after your boyfriend’s death was no time to react excitedly to a brand partnership. Or you could wonder whether a 17-year-old might, in a malformed, immature and potentially traumatized way, have just come to the stunning realization that nobody is immortal, so she would take her ticket out of Strongsville, Ohio, any way it came.
Like “Unknown Number,” a 2025 documentary about a high school catfishing incident, or “I Love You, Now Die,” a 2019 documentary about a girl who might be responsible for her boyfriend’s suicide, encouraging him to kill himself in the moments before his death, “The Crash” treats the digital lives of teenage girls as an anthropological study.
“The Crash” is wildly popular because it hits so many pleasure zones of a good true-crime documentary: a beautiful girl who did something evil, in which case she should be punished, unless she was wrongly convicted, in which case she should be rescued. In camera footage the Toyota speeds toward the brick wall again and again, but nobody knows exactly why. Everyone comes up with a theory: she was angry, she was passed out, Dominic had grabbed the wheel, the brakes failed, they were fighting, they were alive, then they were dead.
But what all of that armchair detective work misses is how little any of us knows about what banal behavior even looks like anymore, as teenagers express it in their various online personas. Mackenzie Shirilla posts that she’s the kind of girl you die for, and it could mean diabolical intent or it could mean nothing at all.
While law enforcement appears stunned that Mackenzie would have continued to post in the time of her deepest grief, what really beggars belief is the idea that, in the time of her deepest grief, she might suddenly stop. It’s all a murky story, and it’s no country for old men.
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