Tegan and Sara have been open with and generous to their fans across their 20-plus-year career. On top of releasing 10 studio albums, they've put out tour films and making-of documentaries for a couple of their albums, the latter done most successfully for their 2007 album The Con (which is how I learned about Ptosis — IYKYK). They've had a memoir, an autobiographical TV show, and a graphic novel about their early adolescence.
So what's possibly left for Tegan and Sara to share? In a surprisingly serious turn of events, Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara reveals that the Calgary-born twins have been holding something back: an elaborate story of how in 2011 somebody hacked Tegan's files, began impersonating her and tricking fans into believing that they were corresponding online with the real Tegan.
In Fanatical, director Erin Lee Carr sets out to tell this story for the first time and to uncover the identity of the impersonator (referred to as Fake Tegan or Fegan throughout the documentary). This is done through interviews with Tegan and Sara, members of their management team, victims of Fegan, Tegan's former partner Lindsey Byrnes, a cyberterrorism expert, and more.
The most affecting part of Fanatical is hearing from the victims who had years-long relationships with Fegan and the psychological toll the experience has taken on them. But, given the sit-down interview format of the documentary, the medium doesn't add much dimension to the story. Spliced together with the interviews are photographs and fan-shot concert footage, but typed-out recreations of the text exchanges between Fegan and their victims make up too much of the runtime, rendering the narrative better suited as a podcast series or long-form article.
Fanatical feels more like true crime than a music documentary, and both Tegan and Sara fans and the technophobic who have never listened to their music will be intrigued by it. Fanatical doesn't really deep-dive into toxic fan culture — although, through Fegan, we gain insight about not only the disturbing side of fandoms and what public-facing people have to deal with, but also the healthy connections that can be made amidst parasocial activity. In the case of Tegan and Sara, friendships and even marriages have come out of their primarily queer fanbase.
Although it's not stated explicitly in the documentary, what lingers is how much the events of Fanatical feel like a warning of what will likely become more common as AI (and more specifically deepfakes) encroaches in all aspects of our lives.