‘Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing’: Netflix’s New Documentary Is Leaving Viewers Deeply Unsettled

Documentary filmmakers rarely return to the same corporate scandal twice, but Rory Kennedy isn’t most filmmakers. Her 2022 film ‘Downfall: The Case Against Boeing’ laid bare the “profits over people” culture inside the aerospace giant, tracing how outsourced parts and covered-up safety issues led to two crashes of the 737 MAX that killed 346 people combined.

Kennedy figured that story was finished once Boeing publicly took responsibility and promised reform. But as she told TIME, that sense of resolution didn’t last long once the 737 MAX returned to the skies. “It did seem initially that it had made some corrections, but soon after the 737 Max got back into the air, I started seeing the headlines again,” Kennedy said in an interview with TIME.

That renewed alarm became the foundation for ‘Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing,’ which premiered on Netflix on August 19 following its world premiere at the DC/DOX Film Festival in June. Viewers have responded strongly since its release, with many describing the film as deeply unsettling given how directly it challenges the idea that Boeing has actually changed.

At the center of the documentary is John Barnett, a Boeing quality manager who spent 32 years at the company and became one of its most prominent whistleblowers, beginning with public complaints reported by The New York Times in 2019. Barnett had documented serious safety and quality issues, including malfunctioning emergency oxygen systems that Boeing’s own internal investigations later corroborated, along with non-conforming parts that prompted an FAA-ordered remediation in 2017.

Barnett was also a key subject of Kennedy’s original ‘Downfall’ documentary and a personal friend of the director. In March 2024, while in the middle of giving a lengthy deposition against Boeing in South Carolina, he failed to appear for his third day of testimony and was later found dead in his truck from what the Charleston County coroner ruled a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Barnett’s death runs through ‘Freefall’ as what Kennedy calls a defining thread of the film, built from his own interviews alongside testimony from other former Boeing employees who describe facing resistance or retaliation after raising safety concerns of their own. The film doesn’t claim Boeing directly caused Barnett’s death, but it does make the case that the company bears responsibility for the pressure that led to it.

Kennedy said in her conversation with Variety that Barnett’s lawyers argue in the film that Boeing may not have killed him outright but is still responsible for his death, calling that conclusion “rather undeniable.”

The documentary arrives at a pointed moment for Boeing’s ongoing operations. The company has continued ramping up production, opening a new 737 MAX assembly line in Everett that joins three existing lines at its Renton plant, part of an effort to increase output from 47 planes a month to 52 as it works through a backlog of roughly 4,300 aircraft. That expansion has come even as Boeing regained additional responsibility for conducting its own final safety checks on the 737 MAX and 787.

Kennedy hasn’t hidden her hope that the film pushes public accountability where she feels regulators have fallen short. She told Variety that with federal enforcement failing to properly hold Boeing accountable, the responsibility now falls on the public to apply pressure, saying she hopes viewers who watch the film reconsider flying with the company if it doesn’t change its culture.

For a documentary revisiting ground its own filmmaker thought she’d already covered, ‘Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing’ has clearly struck a nerve with audiences searching for accountability that still feels unresolved.

Have something to add? Let us know in the comments!