Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy, streaming for those with a Netflix subscription now, is a powerful documentary that hit me hard. I got way more emotional than I thought I would watching it, and while I didn’t think it would actually scare me, it did. I’ve been to thousands of concerts in my life. At one point, I was going to five or six a week. Even before I wrote about music professionally, I loved going to concerts, and over the decades, I’ve seen every kind of show, every kind of artist, and every kind of crowd.
I’ve been in some ugly crowds over the years. From poorly run festivals to sweaty, smoky firetraps that somehow got licenses to operate as music clubs, I’ve definitely felt moments of slight panic over the way a crowd was behaving. On my first night in college, I saw Green Day take to the stage at a free concert in Boston that ended with police in riot gear breaking up crowds in the streets. None of that has ever approached the amount of terror felt by the fans of Travis Scott at the AstroWorld Festival in 2022, and that sickening feeling permeates the whole documentary.
Minutes Into The Doc, My Reaction Was Visceral
It really doesn’t take long for Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy to scare viewers, and it certainly scared me. Before almost anything else, the documentary, part of the Trainwreck series on the 2025 Netflix schedule, features some video shot by fans in the middle of the human crush, and the pit I felt in my stomach never receded for the rest of the film. The screams and pleas from the crowd are really hard to watch and listen to. I’ve never seen anything like it.
The way the documentary immediately pulled me in and never let up is what makes this both a great film and a terrifying experience as a viewer. It’s impossible to know how the victims, both those who survived and those who died, felt in those horrifying moments, but the documentary really does a powerful job in making you feel at least of fraction of how it felt. It’s a fraction I never want to want to feel more of.
The Emotional Toll Was Heavy, Even For Me
The last thing I expected to do while watching this doc was to cry. It’s not that I’m heartless or didn’t understand the gravity of the event, both at the time and when I started the movie. I just didn’t expect it to hit me emotionally quite like it did. I started the movie thinking I would view things more clinically, or more from a reporter's perspective. That is not what happened at all.
Instead, I was completely captivated by the survivors' stories, and I was devastated by the interviews with the friends and family members of the deceased. I was left crying by the end. I was mad at the concert organizers, as I expected to be, but I was left speechless for the victims. This is one of the documentaries that I cannot recommend enough, but I have to warn anyone who sees it that it will be a very hard watch.
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