New Zealand journalist David Farrier specializes in filming oddball human pursuits and peculiar obsessions. Looking for an amusing subject for a playful documentary, he happened upon an online video of “competitive tickling”. where an athletic young man is securely manacled and other athletic young men tickle him. But when Farrier and his partner Dylan Reeve made their very first inquiry, they unleashed a torrent of vile abuse and intimidation.
The documentary Tickled is the story of Farrier and Reeve stumbling upon something apparently silly and harmless, and uncovering a sinister web of sadistic personal destruction. What’s going on here? Whoever is behind the weird but seemingly innocuous tickling videos is acting as if there is something massive worth hiding. There is no escalation in the attacks – because they start out at the maximum. Threats of lawsuits, cyberattacks and invasion of privacy ensue. A three-man team is sent from the US to New Zealand just to intimidate Farrier and Reeve in person. Persisting, Farrier and Reeve uncover a vast underworld operation that has ruined scores of lives.
Farrier and Reeve go to America to track down and face the twisted and sadistic mind behind it all – what they find is unexpected and bizarre. I love jaw-dropping documentaries that reveal human behavior that we could never imagine – and this is one.
Tickled was originally an HBO documentary, but I can’t find it on HBO Max tight now. It is streaming on Amazon. AppleTV and YouTube.