THE DAILY BEAST
“Do I look like a monster to you?” asks Natalia Grace at the outset of The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, at which point the docuseries cuts to a creepy shot of the controversial disabled dwarf staring out a window set to horror movie-style shrieking sound effects.
ID’s follow-up to May’s non-fiction hit wants to have it both ways, suggesting that Natalia is the victim of horrible abuse at the hands of her adopted parents, Michael and Kristine Barnett, and also a potential psychopath who was pretending to be a young girl when she was an adult (à la the Orphan films) and, to top it all off, was intent on murdering her caregivers. As its head-snapping late surprise indicates, all those things might be true. Yet what’s unquestionably clear is that, for all their wild accusations against each other, everyone involved in this trashy saga is more than a bit screwy.
Per its title, The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks is driven by the commentary of its primary subject, who gives her side of the story and, in doing so, touches upon most elements of the original docuseries. This makes ID’s latest (Jan. 1), on the one hand, an alternate-perspective revisitation of already covered material, and its rehashing sometimes leads to runtime-padding wheel-spinning.
Nonetheless, there’s plenty of fresh madness to be found in this six-episode sequel, from allegations about sexual deviance and drug-overdose murder plots, to violent conspiracies, spooky musical cues, and heated confrontations that end in abrupt walkouts. Moreover, there are tears—so many tears—from both Natalia and Michael Barnett, whose sit-downs are the centerpieces of this venture, and feature an absurd amount of performative handwringing, commiserating, blame-game deflection, and finger-pointing in the direction of “evil” Kristine.
The Curious Case Of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks | Official Trailer
Picking up where the shocking finale of THE CURIOUS CASE OF NATALIA GRACE left off, NATALIA SPEAKS dives headfirst into the questions, controversies, and secrets unearthed in the first installment, but this time, Natalia shares her side of the story.
Natalia now lives with Bishop Antwon and Cynthia Mans, the pious couple that happily took her in following her ordeal with the Barnetts, and in her numerous new interviews in The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks, she presents her version of her sensationalistic ordeal. Unsurprisingly, she declares that, despite being legally re-aged by Michael and Kristine from an adolescent to an adult (with her birth year changed from 2003 to 1989), she was not a grown-up while in their custody.
Additionally, she says she is not a homicidal maniac, nor a promiscuous predator who tried to (among other things) fondle a young boy, sleep with old men, or have sex with Michael. She states that this was all concocted by Michael and Kristine, and that their decisions to slander her in this way, to have her committed to a psychiatric hospital, and to abandon her by relocating her to two separate apartments where she lived alone (and had her electricity cut), were cruel and criminally neglectful.
Natalia is pretty persuasive on most of those fronts, since The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Natalia Speaks presents conclusive evidence from a dentist and a DNA lab that Natalia was just a kid when Michael and Kristine did all of this to her. The initial question, then, is why did the Barnetts go through all this trouble? Guided by heavily scripted and tabloid-y narration from “expert” Beth Karas and endless self-serving blather…
