At the center of Sam Hobkinson’s compelling documentary is a World War II survival tale that is almost too astonishing to be believable. A seven-year-old Jewish orphan runs away from her Catholic foster family in Belgium and walks to Nazi Germany on a quest to find her deported parents. In the woods, she’s adopted by a pack of wolves. “I was so overwhelmed by this story,” recalls Boston radio host Candy O’Terry. “Misha Defonseca checked every single box for the type of woman that we looked for to interview on Exceptional Women.” Conveniently for her, the Belgian immigrant and her husband lived 20 miles away from her radio station in Millis, Massachusetts.

O’Terry was not the only one to be awed. Defonseca’s harrowing account, which she had also shared with her local synagogue on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, also attracted the attention of publisher Jane Daniel, who spotted its mythic qualities and believed such a memoir could become a best seller, especially after Oprah Winfrey’s book club and Disney expressed interest in the book.

Then trouble began to brew. Published in 1997, the book failed to sell in the United States, although it became a best seller in Europe. To Daniel’s puzzlement, Defonseca refused to go on Winfrey’s talk show even though its producers, in preparation for the episode, had filmed the author bonding with a wolf in a sanctuary. And in 1998, Defonseca sued Daniel for the return of the book’s copyright and her rightful share of European royalties, and eventually won a $22.5 million judgement against the publisher.

“I was destroyed at that point,’ says Daniel. The lawsuit “made me look like a monster,” as an exploiter of a Holocaust survivor. Seeking to repair her reputation and facing financial ruin unless she could get the judgement overturned, the publisher began to investigate Defonseca’s background.

At this point, the narrative, a mixture of conventional talking-head shots and slickly produced reenactments in the grand tradition of Dateline NBC, kicks into suspenseful true-crime high gear with pinned maps, archival footage, and Nick Foster’s melodramatic score as Daniel’s research reveals twist after twist. Each leading player is introduced like a character in a thriller: “The Genealogist,” “The Holocaust Survivor,” “The Journalist,” and “The Holocaust Historian.”

Despite this manipulative staginess, the filmmaker raises some provocative questions. Why were people so eager to accept and promote Defonseca’s story? What are the ethics of questioning the veracity of a Holocaust’s survivor’s account? Hobkinson also lightly touches on the nature of the Holocaust industry (the books, the documentary and feature films, the TV talk shows) but doesn’t dig too deeply. Perhaps the most moving figure in this sad story is Evelyne Haendel, a Jewish “hidden child” during the war, who, after suffering a nervous breakdown at age 40, researched her own parents’ tragic fate at Auschwitz.

The documentary certainly holds your interest, especially after Daniel begins her investigation—its the strongest segment. However, Hobkinson tries too hard to misdirect the viewer with the aforementioned gimmicks when the intrinsic drama of Defonseca’s actions is suspenseful enough. The gradual realization that one interview subject is actually an actor feels especially manipulative as a meta attempt to demonstrate how people assume what they see/read is true if the makers say it’s true.

Although there is some armchair psychology about Defonseca’s behavior and why people were so willing to believe her, the filmmaker fails to go further into a fascinating and unpredictable tale to expose deeper truths. By choosing showy style over substance, this film is a missed opportunity at exploring storytelling and the nature of lies.