Netflix’s Russell Brand documentary feels like a horror film

Detailed summary

Open Secret gives a disturbing account of how his shocking behaviour and outrageous persona foreshadowed his crimes for years – and how we let him get away with it ...

It was an inspired choice to use “The Hall of the Mountain King” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt to soundtrack the first few minutes of Netflix’s new Russell Brand documentary, Open Secret. Playful and ominous, impish and terrifying, its accelerating tempo adds ghoulish anticipation to clips of Brand larking about in his tight T-shirted youth, his smile already greedy, his eyes seemingly full of foreboding. These clips would have seemed innocent enough at the time – but we all know, now, that they foreshadow the crimes this “rock star” of British comedy would go on to commit, and for which he has just begun a decade-long prison sentence.

Netflix is quick off the mark – Brand was sentenced only on Monday. Now that he has been convicted of rape and sexual assault in a court of law, a documentary that has clearly been months or years in the making can be released in all its darkness, telling the story not only of his downfall but of the hard work of Sunday Times journalists Rosamund Urwin and Charlotte Wace, who originally broke the story.

It also includes interviews with comedians Nish Kumar and Harriet Kemsley, actor and writer Sarah Solemani, Brand’s former flatmate, and three of his ex-girlfriends. One of them, Jordan Martin, speaks on camera about the abuse she allegedly suffered, both sexual assault and coercive control; and one of them is Georgina Baillie, granddaughter of Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs and the person at the centre of Sachsgate, the Radio 2 scandal with Jonathan Ross that led to Brand resigning from the BBC.

Anyone who has been following the case, or even those who have seen resurfaced clips online, will be aware of how Brand’s abuse was – as the title puts it – an open secret in the TV and comedy industries. But seeing it all put together here, this new testimony from victims and verbatim re-enactments of key Sunday Times interviews – interspersed with footage from the grubby 2000s and Brand’s own tasteless, self-aggrandising jokes – feels different…

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