The Twister: Caught in the Storm

22 May 2011, Joplin, Missouri. There is a high school graduation that day. Some circles had said the world would end on that same date, and in town it was a joke. The ceremony ends, the young people scatter, and hours later a tornado comes across the town. It reaches nearly a mile wide, the wind touches two hundred miles an hour, and it passes through the middle of the city. The documentary tells that day in the words of a group who were of high school age at the time. Alexandra Lacey directs. It was released on Netflix on 19 March 2025 and runs 88 minutes. The tornado was rated EF5; 158 people were killed and about 7,500 homes were damaged or destroyed. The method rests on archive: footage shot on phones that day, radio recordings and audio from the walk-in cooler of a petrol station are used directly. The narrative does not try to explain the meteorology; the subject is the minutes between the warning and the tornado, and the decisions taken in them. Its hardest section is the search for the missing; the narrative does not say who survived until the end. Its limit is form; the narrative deliberately raises tension, and given the subject that choice is arguable. Who it is for: viewers who watch natural disaster documentary and witness accounts. Who it is not for: the audio is hard to take, the editing presses on the emotion, and for anyone who lived through it the film is shattering.