TV Review: Hulu’s “Swipe Right on the Devil” Conjures a Chilling, Seasonally Spooky True Crime Story
True Crime documentaries are usually dark, but Hulu’s latest comes with seasonally appropriate undertones. A belief in witchcraft is at the center of the three-part series Swipe Right on the Devil, chronicling the 2017 murder of Sydney Loofe. Extensively researched and featuring first-time interviews with people connected to the events, the series will make anyone familiar with the story see it in a new light, and everyone else will be shocked by its horrific darkness.
When 24-year-old Sydney Loofe disappeared after a second Tinder date with a woman named “Audrey,” her friends and family jumped into action to try and find her. The first episode, “The Search for Sydney,” includes interviews with Sydney’s siblings, friends, coworkers, and local law enforcement who led the early efforts to bring her home. It also dips into the people responsible.
The first episode opens with interview audio about witches and witchcraft from one of Sydney’s killers. Episode 2, “Another Missing Girl,” gets into the weeds on the twisted couple who allegedly tried to build a dark coven. Jaya Golyakova and Kaitlyn Brandle share their experiences of living with the killers, helping to lay the foundation for their intent when they were finding girls like Sydney on Tinder. Meanwhile, the investigation continues, leading to the discovery of Sydney’s remains.
The final chapter, “Witches Can Be Made,” deals with the arrest, trial, and conviction of Sydney’s killers. It uncovers the darkest elements of the doc, which is rooted less in the occult and more in the twisted depravity of two dark individuals who somehow found each other. It tries to find a small silver lining, if one exists, but with such an overwhelmingly dark tale, there’s not much the storytellers can do.
From Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Documentaries, Swipe Right on the Devil uses archival investigative footage, stylized talking-head interviews, and spooky coven-circle reenactments that underscore the dark-fantasy element of the killers’ story. Director Brian Biegel jumps around the timeline to group topics by theme, giving each episode a distinctive feel rather than a three-hour doc broken into three parts. There’s also an admirable focus not just on the what, but on the who, with each major participant's life story summarized.
While the marketing and narrative focus on the occult aspects, the real reason to tell this story is the quick action taken by Sydney’s loved ones and the law enforcement who took her disappearance seriously, leaving no stone unturned. The narrative has a bittersweet quality by the end, though I found it hard to sit in the story’s darkness as long as the series lingers, and a two-part cut or feature-length doc might’ve given it fewer lulls where you can sometimes feel the team stretching to reach a desired episode length.
I give Swipe Right on the Devil 3.5 out of 5 stars.
Swipe Right on the Devil premieres Thursday, October 22nd, on Hulu.