Netflix’s The Twister: Caught in the Storm Highlights the Horrifying Power of Nature
On any given morning, millions of Americans step out of their doors heedless of the elemental truth that supposed technological mastery of the planet has minimized from our consciousness: We are not in control of the most basic facets of our worldly experience. Sure, we can say with some degree of certainty that the day will entail driving to work, going through the motions of our jobs, etc. But when dueling cold fronts and warm fronts collide in just the right way? When the incalculable powers of the natural world are channeled, and decide to drop a vortex above your head that rips that fragile building to pieces while you cower inside it? Well, in that moment there’s really not much you can do but accept your utter powerlessness and be humbled. It’s the kind of moment that, because it’s both fleeting and terrifying, is rarely captured on camera. But Netflix’s new documentary film The Twister: Caught in the Storm does manage to bring together some of those rare moments, and the distance of more than a decade has done nothing to dull their intensity. What we have here are basically dispatches from the end of the world.
That kind of apocalyptic imagery is a focal point for The Twister, owing to the time and place of its centerpiece storm and EF-5 tornado, which tragically demolished much of the small city of Joplin, Missouri on Sunday, May 22, 2011, killing more than 150 people. In a way, residents of the highly religious, evangelical community had already been on a sort of spiritual high alert: The day earlier, May 21, 2011 had been the day claimed as the date of the “end of the world” by well-known televangelist Harold Camping, who had convinced many of his followers to prepare for the Rapture. Simultaneously, a certain pop culture fascination with the end times had been bubbling up, tied into the so-called 2012 phenomenon attached to the supposed end of the Mayan long count calendar, as depicted on the big screen in Roland Emmerich’s disaster film 2012. This potent blend of conspiratorial thinking, satire and Christian millennialism already had the graduating high school class of Joplin referring to themselves as the “class of the apocalypse,” according to some of the people interviewed. The night before the tornado, many of those students partied and drank late into the night, ironically celebrating the supposed end of the world, unaware that the city of Joplin really would be turned upside down some 17 hours later.
Our experience of The Twister is told specifically through these eyes: Those of young people in Joplin who were attending their own high school graduation that Sunday as the storm approached, or had recently graduated. It’s an interesting narrowing of focus for the documentary, which could have just as easily involved a full cross-section of the town. Instead, by focusing on people who were largely teens or in their early 20s at the time, The Twister has selected subjects for whom the storm and the tornado were even more formative events: For many, perhaps the dividing line between “childhood” and a sober adulthood they were thrust into as their homes were destroyed or loved ones were killed.
The talking heads here still are something of a cultural cross-section for the young residents of Joplin, and illustrate the differing experiences that people in town had during the tornado, dependent largely upon the dice roll of their precise physical location. There’s the captain of the high school football team, who left graduation in time to avoid the tornado by being on the outskirts of Joplin, and then returned to help in the immediate rescue efforts. There’s the kid who was working in a frozen yogurt shop, only to watch his workplace destroyed around him. There’s the trio of storm-chasing friends who found themselves hauling ass as the twister bore down on them, taking shelter in a convenience store that was subsequently ripped apart (they survived). There’s the group of local stoner teens who were caught inside a truck in the path of the tornado, surviving being tossed through the air by the force of the winds, only to contract a dangerous fungal infection in the aftermath. And there’s even a 13-year-old boy from California who just so happened to be visiting Joplin with his mother that day, specifically because he was fascinated by meteorology and wanted to study tornadoes while shadowing the local weatherman. Suffice to say, that kid got way more than he bargained for.
The potential stumbling block for a documentary in the mold of The Twister is of course that it would be primarily exploitative–the work of vultures who have combed through the wreckage of Joplin’s tragedy in order to find some human misery to turn into Netflix streaming content profit. The film thankfully doesn’t really linger on specific bits of carnage, however–it concerns itself much more tightly with the lived experience of its subjects. The chief goal seems to be giving them a chance to express what exactly it is they were seeing, hearing and emotionally experiencing in those moments as the sky turned black and a wall of death came hurtling at them. To those who survived, the tornado perhaps understandably lives in their minds as a profound experience. You can’t help but feel some sense of awe as one of the survivors of the destroyed convenience store describes looking up in a calm moment and realizing they’re within the eye of the absolutely massive tornado, describing a blue sky surrounded by the vortex, and knowing that they’re about to be pelted with painful debris all over again. This particular site even has an audio recording to go along with it, recorded via the young woman’s phone–you can hear her and her companions screaming and calling each other’s names as they cling to each other and the roaring winds buffet them from all sides, threatening to carry them off into oblivion. In a word, it’s absolutely chilling audio.
With that said, the biggest issue with The Twister: Caught in the Storm is potentially the question of transparency, when it comes to its various sources of footage and audio. Whereas the source of the audio recording from the convenience store is clear in the context of the film, much of what we see in The Twister has no such clear source. Often, we’re hearing the voice of one of the film’s talking heads and then seeing storm footage, and it’s entirely unclear whether the implication is that we’re seeing their footage, or even images that are specifically captured from the Joplin tornado. There’s definitely quite a bit of other stock storm footage (and reenactment footage) being used here, so it would have been much more helpful if the filmmakers of The Twister had included on-screen credit/sourcing notes to make it more clear what we’re seeing at any given moment. Not knowing the provenance of what we’re seeing cuts into the film’s sense of veracity, at times, but at least the interviewees are always there to ground the story in their lived experience.
The Twister could perhaps have included even more perspectives, and it only really lightly grazes the continuing cultural impact of the storm in Joplin, while hinting at some of the repressive atmosphere that had always existed there, as in so many small Midwestern cities. The frozen yogurt worker, who is gay, for instance hints at the discrimination he had faced throughout his life in Joplin’s schools, but we don’t dwell on the details of his life, or how things might be different today. It is distinctly sad, though, to hear him speak about the clash between his identity and Christian faith, and the way it made him question, surveying the destruction and seeming lack of people, whether the Rapture truly had come and he had been “left behind” for the sin of being a gay man. That’s a heartbreaking slice of real, recognizable small-town trauma.
At its most powerful, The Twister is remarkable for the brief moments it captures that are so rarely reflected in an accurate way. The audio from the convenience store comes to mind again–we actually hear the moment that the woman and her two companions run through the doors of the store, only to find that everyone inside is totally ignorant of the massive tornado that is bearing down on them, only moments away. In real time, you can hear these panicked people attempt to convince everyone else present to take shelter with them, because they know something that the others do not. Thankfully, they don’t share the fate of Cassandra, but it’s horrifying to imagine how easily things could have been different.
The Twister leaves you shivering at the thought of man’s insignificance against the sheer power of the natural world, with a brief denouement for reflection and healing in the wake of catastrophe. We could perhaps go even deeper into how the documentary’s subjects have truly been altered forever by what happened to them–no one mentions nightmares as far as I can recall, and surely they must be having them–but its access to first-hand accounts (and some footage) of an extraordinary event make it difficult to turn away.
Director: Alexandra Lacey
Writer: Alexandra Lacey
Release date: March 19, 2025 (Netflix)
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.