By John Corrado

The 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival ran from April 25th to May 5th in Toronto

In 2019, Ina Steiner and her husband David, the bloggers behind the website EcommerceBytes who specialized in providing advice to eBay sellers, began receiving a series of threatening and intimidating messages. These messages gave way to a series of increasingly disturbing packages being delivered to their home in Natick, Massachusetts, and mysterious cars trailing them soon after that.

Director Jenny Carchman charts this investigation in her documentary Whatever It Takes, a disturbing and thought-provoking real life cyber crimes thriller. In uncovering the origins of the creepy packages (including a bloody pig mask from one of the Saw movies) that were being sent to this unsuspecting couple, her film takes us down a rabbit hole of corporate greed and power-hungry players within the ruthless world of Silicon Valley.

Ina and David Steiner are merely some of the sympathetic victims at the centre of it, and Carchman is wise to frame her film around their horrified reactions to being repeatedly doxed and swatted, getting the local Natick police department involved. The engaging documentary is edited together to move at a quick clip, mixing interviews, Ring doorbell footage, messages on screen, and even movie clips to immerse us in the paranoia and revealing details of the case.

Film Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)

This is Going to Be Big screened as part of the 2024 Hot Docs Film Festival.