On July 31, 2022, in Strongsville, Ohio, a car traveling at 100 miles per hour struck a brick building with three people inside. Two of them – Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan – did not survive. The third, seventeen-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla, walked away the sole survivor and, within months, the prime suspect in a double murder case that would divide public opinion across the country. What began as a presumed accident was reclassified as an intentional killing – a determination that ultimately sent Shirilla to prison for life.
Now, nearly four years on, director Gareth Johnson has built a feature-length Netflix true crime documentary around that night and everything that followed: the investigation, the trial, the conviction, the appeals – and, for the first time, an on-camera interview with Shirilla herself, conducted from prison. The Crash arrived on Netflix on May 15, 2026, and has since climbed to No. 1 in the Netflix Top 10 in the United States, a reflection of how deeply the case continues to unsettle and compel.
Here’s everything you need to know about The Crash: from the story and cast to early reactions and release details. The trailer is at the end of the article.
The Crash: full details
- Title: The Crash
- Format: Documentary Film
- Runtime:1h 34m
- Genre: True Crime, Documentary
- Director: Gareth Johnson
- Exec. Producers: Rebecca North, Jonny Taylor
- Producer: Angharad Scott
- Production: Raw TV
- Platform: Netflix
- Release Date: May 15, 2026
- Language: English
- Content Warnings: Teen death, disturbing bodycam footage, underage drug use
What is The Crash about?
In the early hours of July 31, 2022, Mackenzie Shirilla drove a car carrying her boyfriend Dominic Russo and his friend Davion Flanagan into the wall of a Strongsville, Ohio building at extraordinary speed. Investigators initially treated the scene as a tragic accident. Then, as weeks became months, a different picture emerged: one built on text messages, surveillance footage, cellphone records, and testimony from those who knew the trio. Prosecutors concluded that the crash had been deliberate – that Shirilla had intended to kill the two men in the car with her. She was convicted on twelve felony charges including murder and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after fifteen years. A judge, at sentencing, called her “hell on wheels.”
The Crash does not simply reconstruct the crime. Johnson’s documentary uses police dashcam footage, bodycam recordings, surveillance video, court evidence, and interviews with the families of all three young people involved to interrogate the deeper questions the case raises – about a volatile teenage relationship, about the role of social media in shaping public perception, and about what it means when an act resists easy categorization as either accident or premeditation. The film is interested in ambiguity: not to exonerate Shirilla, but to understand how a community, a court, and a country arrived at such different conclusions about what really happened that night.
Who directed The Crash
Gareth Johnson is a British documentary director who has built a distinctive body of work in the true crime documentary space, primarily through his long-running collaboration with production company Raw TV. His most prominent prior credit is The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman (Netflix, 2022), a three-part documentary that followed investigators and victims pursuing con artist Robert Hendy-Freegard – a project that demonstrated Johnson’s ability to build sustained narrative tension across complex, multi-year storylines.
For The Crash, Johnson worked alongside producer Angharad Scott – whose credits include Reframed: Marilyn Monroe and Beanie Mania – and executive producers Rebecca North and Jonny Taylor, both senior figures at Raw TV. North’s credits include American Nightmare and Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare; Taylor’s span Lover Stalker Killer, What Jennifer Did, and Vatican Girl. Raw TV’s partnership with Netflix in the true crime space has produced some of the platform’s most-discussed titles, including Don’t F**k with Cats and The Tinder Swindler.
Key figures and interviews
Unlike most documentaries revisiting the Shirilla case, The Crash secured something its predecessors could not: a direct, on-camera interview with Mackenzie Shirilla herself, conducted at the Ohio Reformatory for Women – the first time she had spoken on camera since her conviction, and notably, the first time she had ever spoken to any interviewer, including police, before or after her arrest. The filmmakers were given exactly one hour for the sit-down.
“I’m not saying I’m innocent. I was a driver of a tragedy, but I’m not a murderer.” Mackenzie Shirilla, speaking in The Crash
The interview was conducted with Shirilla’s lawyer present – a detail Johnson deliberately left in the final cut. “I thought it was important that the audience understood the circumstances that interview was held under,” he explained. The documentary also features extensive testimony from the families of Dominic Russo and Davion Flanagan, providing emotional counterweight that keeps the film grounded in grief rather than spectacle. Shirilla remains incarcerated, with her earliest parole hearing scheduled for 2037. Multiple appeals have been denied, most recently in March 2026.
Is it based on a true story?
The Crash is a documentary based entirely on real events. The crash at the center of the film occurred on July 31, 2022, in Strongsville, Ohio. Mackenzie Shirilla, then seventeen, was tried as an adult, convicted on twelve felony counts including two counts of murder, and sentenced to life in prison in August 2023. The case had previously been examined in Channel 4’s Killer Cases Season 4 and in Mean Girl Murders. The Netflix documentary draws directly on case evidence, official records, bodycam and surveillance footage, courtroom material, and first-person interviews – presenting itself not as a dramatization but as a reconstruction.
What critics are saying about The Crash
Critical reception has been measured and, in places, divided – though largely respectful of Johnson’s craft. Writing for InSession Film, one critic noted that the documentary avoids the stylistic excess that has come to define the genre: no dramatic recreations, no editing engineered for social media virality. Johnson keeps the tone grounded, and the use of authentic police dashcam footage – including the moment investigators informed Shirilla’s parents – lends the film an emotional authenticity that staged reconstruction cannot replicate. The same review drew a direct comparison to The Perfect Neighbor, noting that this kind of unmediated footage is setting a new benchmark for the form.
On Rotten Tomatoes, several critics converged on the film’s portrait of Shirilla as a young woman shaped and possibly distorted by social media performance. One critic described it as an inadvertent indictment of a youth culture built on curating false lifestyles. Others acknowledged that the documentary uncovers little new factual ground – the case record is well established – but argued that the rarity of its interviews, particularly the prison sit-down, justifies its existence. A minority found the framing too skewed toward the prosecution. The debate, as much as the film itself, reflects why the case continues to generate strong reactions.
Why it’s worth watching
If you engaged with American Nightmare or The Tinder Swindler, The Crash explores similar territory, combining the procedural rigor of a true crime investigation documentary with an unsettling intimacy born from access that most films in the genre never achieve. What separates it from standard true crime fare is its refusal to deliver a comfortable verdict: the film gives the audience the evidence and the testimony and trusts them to sit with the discomfort of a case that remains, for many, genuinely unresolved.
When it’s streaming
Streaming on Netflix starting May 15, 2026. Watch The Crash on Netflix
Trailer
Here’s the official trailer to get a sense of the tone and atmosphere.
