'Ctrl+Alt+Desire': The Story of a Cult of One

By Alison Lanier | TV | April 24, 2024 |

By Alison Lanier | TV | April 24, 2024 |

Ctrl+Alt+Desire is one of the most recent well-made true-crime docuseries with a truly ridiculous name and a terrifying story. In filmmaker Colin Archdeacon’s directorial debut, Archdeacon spends four years connecting with and interviewing one of the most pathetic and frightening true crime subjects I’ve ever seen: Grant Amato.

Amato, who was twenty-nine when he was accused of murdering his parents and beloved brother, is the walking definition of delusion. Amato torpedoed almost every aspect of his life — as a nurse, through emotional outbursts and self-medicating his patients, and as a son, through self-isolation from his parents and brother with whom he lived and on whom he was financially dependent.

Cue the descent into an adolescent spiral of self-destruction: Amato shut himself in his room and binged anime and video games rather than confront the failure of his professional and emotional life. There was, apparently and understandably, solace in having other online worlds to inhabit rather than the one that reflected his personal failings at every turn.

Then, Amato fell in love with a Bulgarian online cam model called Silvie. In one sense, it’s like the stereotypical story of the guy who thinks the girl at the comic book shop is in love with him because she’ll make friendly conversation when he comes in, because he is a customer and she is at work. In another, it’s far, far darker.

Sylvie was at work, doing her job, fostering a sense of intimacy — which is her job — with the viewing audience, who could comment and tip her from afar. Amato, convinced he was embarking on an actual romantic relationship, commits insane levels of theft and fraud to pay Sylvie hundreds of thousands of dollars, all to garner more and more of her attention. He crafted his online persona: successful, wealthy, confident, cool. That was who he told himself he was online, and who he told himself Silvie was in love with.

Archdeacon does a good job of balancing Amato’s delusional viewpoint with the reality of working cam models, several of whom have surprisingly personal relationships with their customers. One model calls a client during one of her interviews, and their conversation is friendly and caring, where she encourages her client to go to therapy to talk through some of the difficult things that he’s dealing with in his life. It’s easy to see how a desperately lonely and self-aggrandizing man might read this kind of caring feminine attention in a more extreme way-especially after immersing himself in shows and games in which girl-talks-to-boy means girl-is-deeply-in-love-with-boy.

There are many, many levels of profound tragedy that play out from Amato’s delusion. There’s the pain he caused his family, who tried to get him help again and again with a nearly saintly level of patience, even after he committed huge levels of financial fraud under their names. There’s the trauma caused to Silvie, who, five years after her contact with Amato, is still trying to heal and whose life and career have been completely upended by a story she can’t escape.

Archdeacon puts a huge amount of effort into tracking Silvie down, and the results solidify, as if there were any doubt, how little she wants to do with her ex-client and the damage he’s done through his stories. At one point, Amato reads out a clearly forged letter from Silvie, which he claims she wrote to him in jail, where he writes that he “made her feel like a little girl again.” While Archdeacon perhaps crossed a line in pursuing Silvie when she clearly did not want to be found, he did accomplish the clear and concrete fact that the stories Amato is now telling about her — and the letters he is inventing from her — are as fictional as the rest of their relationship.

Nearly every person who recalls interacting with Amato described him as “cold” — one of the coldest people they’d ever met. I’m no psychologist, but if ever there was a person displaying clearly sociopathic characteristics, Amato is it. He describes his favorite anime, Death Note, and how he unironically identifies with the “hero” character, Light (who is not actually a hero by any stretch), and how Light takes on himself the responsibility of purging whoever he deems unworthy from the earth. Yeah. Amato used “Light” in nearly all the user names we see in the series.

Media illiteracy isn’t a crime, but it is so, so telling that Amato couldn’t parse the media in which he immersed himself. Rather, he decides every story, every human interaction, every transaction of money or time, meant whatever he wanted it to. The world supported his perception at every turn. It goes beyond confirmation bias: the docuseries becomes a view into a cult of one, a personal world cultivated over years and divorced from the reality of other people.

There’s an easy parallel to make here to other kinds of self-curated, self-created digital realities that fuel dangerous entities like conspiracy theories and the MAGA horde. Amato’s case feels like all of that delusion, wrapped into the microcosm of one person. Archdeacon told Variety that he wanted to “[explore] the way technology and loneliness are reshaping society,” often in ways we can’t yet understand, though we’re living with their consequences.

Archdeacon is visibly disturbed by his interview subject, appropriately wary of believing anything Amato says. He becomes in a way a proxy for the audience’s experience, which to me at least feels very similar: fascinated and disturbed, both by the facts of what this person has done and how little the world of other people means to him.

Ctrl+Alt+Desire is now streaming on Paramount Plus.