There is no satisfying "why" in Friends Like These: The Murder of Skylar Neese, and that is exactly what makes it unbearable. Skylar was sixteen, funny, sharp, and loved — and all of a sudden, she goes missing.

The documentary is at its strongest when it stays with the Neese family, whose stubborn refusal to accept "runaway" as an answer is the only reason this case was ever solved. Their grief is not packaged for you; it sits there, raw, in living rooms and on porches, and it is heartbreaking in a way slicker Netflix docs rarely manage.

What lands hardest in 2026 is the digital paper trail. Tweets, texts, and the endless performance of teenage friendship online are all over this case — the passive-aggressive subtweets, the public displays of loyalty, the crowd watching. Live-tweeting a friendship into the ground turns out to be its own kind of accelerant, and the film does not need to lecture you about it because the timestamps do the work.

It is not a twisty watch. There is no puzzle box, no last-act reveal. It is just the slow, awful accounting of a beautiful life ended for absolutely nothing, and a reminder that the cruellest crimes are often the least cinematic ones.

Devastating, well handled, and impossible to shake. Just do not go in expecting an answer that makes sense — there is not one.