Showmax has just dropped the harrowing trailer for Original Sin: My Son The Killer, a true-crime feature documentary premiering on the African streamer on Friday, 22 March.
Original Sin follows Thea Pretorius, the mother of Gerhard Jansen van Vuuren, who murdered his 25-year-old girlfriend Andrea Venter in front of her neighbours, security guards and CCTV cameras. He then escaped authorities in South Africa and Brazil for years, assuming three different identities and starting families with multiple women. After initially helping him escape, Thea slowly had to come to terms with her son being a killer. As she admits in the trailer, “He’s capable of worse things.”
“Every 63 seconds a woman becomes a victim of gender-based violence in South Africa,” says director John Gutierrez, whose debut feature Sons of the Sea was named Best South African Film at the Durban International Film Festival. “Before Andrea was murdered, she was hunted by Gerhard. She did everything that could be expected of her, including filing a restraining order and moving cities, but it wasn’t enough.”
Former South African Police Service head profiler Dr Gérard Labuschagne says in Original Sin that this is the case that “stands out the most” in his career.
The cat and mouse chase across two continents is interwoven with CCTV footage of Andrea’s murder; footage from Gerhard’s trials; and interviews with both their families, as well as the Brazilian Federal Police, Rio de Janeiro Interpol and the South African police and legal teams on the case.
Thea’s perspective is central. “She’s asking herself how her little boy with ‘a gentle spirit’ became a murderer, and what her responsibility is,” says John, who also edited Peter Bogdanovich’s Grammy-winning Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream. “Thea is both Gerhard’s mother and a survivor of gender-based violence herself, so she’s deeply conflicted.”
Take a look at the trailer right here :
