The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson is a solid true crime documentary that follows the format to a tee. It delivers everything one expects from the genre: a titillating case, the nuts and bolts of the investigation, and a tidy (in terms of filmmaking) conclusion. The problem is that this is a run of the mill documentary that doesn’t reach, and barely scratches the surface of, the aspirations of its title.
That’s what makes Moriah Wilson a frustrating watch. Every death is a tragedy in myriad ways, including Moriah Wilson, affectionately known as Mo to those closest to her. It’s nearly impossible to condense a person’s life into a 90 minute runtime, moreso when that life is juxtaposed against the tragedy of their death. In the quest to cover the scope of Moriah’s life, depth is sacrificed for the sake of brevity. One of the great tragedies of true crime as a genre, and this is hardly an original opinion, is that it reduces the sprawl and messiness of life to something linear and tangible, organizing something that is fundamentally disorganized.
Moriah Wilson was an athlete through and through. She was a nationally ranked skier before multiple knee injuries cut those dreams short. She pivoted to cycling, where she quickly rose through the ranks and turned pro. As described by her friends and family, Moriah loved being outdoors and active. Cycling brought her into the orbit of Colin Strickland and his on-and-off girlfriend Kaitlin Armstrong. Moriah ended up caught in the web of Strickland and Armstrong’s toxic relationship, which culminated with Armstrong shooting Moriah dead on May 11th, 2022, then going on the run for a month and a half before being captured by authorities.
Murdered just shy of her 26th birthday, Moriah’s life was really just beginning when it was cut short. The film gives Moriah the sympathetic treatment she deserves, but it comes at the expense of nuance. The interviews and home video footage give viewers a taste of who Moriah was, but not much more. The investigation into her murder gets a similar cursory treatment. There isn’t much mystery to what happened to Moriah, as she had feelings for Strickland and Armstrong didn’t take kindly to their burgeoning relationship. Strickland is painted as a manipulator and Armstrong as jealous and possessive, and they may very well be. The documentary takes the easy way out in their portrayal. They’re the villains in the story, but little effort is given to fleshing them out as people. In that regard, The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah WIlson isn’t the first documentary to present a fairly one-sided version of a story. But, by the time the film is over, we haven’t learned much more than what a quick Google search would turn up. As it stands, director Marina Zenovich delivers a solid account of Moriah’s life and death, but there is nothing here to make her story stand out from the litany of other similar true crime docs, and that’s the true tragedy.
