(Credits: Netflix)

Most of the time, the hardest part of watching something on Netflix is actually choosing it. Half the time, you pick a movie thinking you’ll give it ten minutes, and then you’re just… Bored. Well, that’s not the case with The Trial of the Chicago 7. One of the best works of Sacha Baron Cohen, this movie is a Netflix masterpiece.

The whole thing is based on this real trial from the late 60s, after protests in Chicago turned violent, and a group of activists got charged for it. But don’t worry, you won’t waste your time watching the slow setup because it drops you right into the courtroom when everything is already in motion. People are arguing; lawyers are interrupting each other. However, you’ll need some time to process what’s going on.

And then it does something smart. It keeps cutting back to the protests while the trial is happening. So you are not just listening to people argue about what happened; you are actually seeing it play out. And that’s when you start catching things. Someone says one version in court, and then you see something slightly different. Basically, you are working with multiple perspectives here.

But then comes the turning point when Bobby Seale is in court asking for his basic rights, and things start getting tense, and you are thinking, okay, this will get sorted, but it doesn’t. The judge orders him to be tied up and gagged right there in the courtroom. And yeah… that actually happened. The movie is not trying to be dramatic here; this happened in real life. Once that hits, you don’t really watch the rest of the film the same way.

Then you start noticing the people more. For example, Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman is the one you keep coming back to, because every time he speaks, something changes in the room. Then you have got Eddie Redmayne playing things a lot more seriously, trying to keep everything under control. But the main character here is the tension between those two, which comes from real disagreements between the people they are playing.

Mark Rylance as the defence lawyer is great to watch because he is always a step ahead, while Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the prosecutor doesn’t feel like a typical bad guy, which makes the whole thing feel more real than you expect. And then the judge, played by Frank Langella… Yeah, you are going to have reactions to him. A lot of them.

And then you find out the story behind the movie itself, and it gets even more interesting. The script was written years before it actually got made, and at one point, Steven Spielberg was supposed to direct it. That version never happened, and much later, Aaron Sorkin stepped in and directed it himself.

By the time it ends, you are thinking about what you just watched and the fact that most of it actually happened. And that’s what makes it the perfect Netflix movie for when you don’t know what to watch.