We remain fascinated and horrified by the hows and whys of cult narratives, how someone could be so seduced by something so unknown and why they would then risk everything for it. Oscar-winning writer-director Guy Nattiv has been personally affected by these questions for most of his life, his grandmother joining a cult when he was a child and never coming back.
His attempt to try to understand who she was and why she acted in such a way has led to unsettling drama The Liberation, a fictionalised tale that acts as a form of therapy for him and a mostly successful antidote to more sensationalist cult stories for us. Enough Netflix docuseries and schlocky horror movies have given us a more extreme and often violent idea of how cults infect and destroy vulnerable people but Nattiv opts for a more thoughtful slow-burn. He’s recruited a suitably thoughtful actor in Carrie Coon, no stranger to this particular psychology having broken out in The Leftovers, one of the more intelligent cult dramas in recent years.
It’s a rare big-screen lead for Coon, an actor who made a name for herself a little later than most, and she tears into it, working hard to try to bring us into the mindset of someone who would do something so unimaginable. We might never truly understand or even like her all that much but we believe her and like Nattiv, we’re haunted by her actions.
Like his grandmother, the character is called Rita, a wife, mother and assistant bank manager living in early 80s New Jersey. Her life is small and undeniably average but not unhappy, her husband (played warmly by Coon’s real-life spouse Tracy Letts) is loving and she is close to her two daughters (played by Odessa Young and a tenacious Bella Ramsey). But Rita has a past that won’t let her fully relax into her life: she grew up in Poland and endured the horrors of the Holocaust, her family taken from her at a young age. Like the most susceptible of us, she’s an open wound, something quickly realised by the charismatic, raven-haired Ricky (Lily James), who invites her to join a group of friends at the beach. Rita is baffled by the offer and by Ricky in general but also flattered, an attractive younger woman suddenly flooding her with attention and compliments.
The film flips back and forth between the gradual, awful grooming process as Rita spends more and more time with Ricky’s heart-over-head all-female troupe, dancing and appreciating nature, and then much later when her concerned daughters track her down to a remote compound. I don’t know if the timeline-switching really adds all that much, a common complaint at the moment, but it’s less distractingly gimmicky and more inconsequential.
The cult is very much rooted in its time, those who believe in nature and love and spirituality rallying against the gluttony of overconsumption as the 70s starts to give way to a decade of greed and excess, but it’s also one that feels horribly relevant today. There are Maha echoes in how Ricky bloviates about the rot of modern medicine (she calls doctors “barbaric predators”) and how much more qualified she is to treat any ailments the women have. (Who needs insulin when you can have concentrated mistletoe extract and fenugreek?) Nattiv gets that, for all of her flowery slogans (which again could just come directly from a vapid contemporary LA influencer), Ricky, like many cult leaders, is just a garden-variety narcissist who believes she knows better than any system or expert and her professions of love inevitably turn into demands for money. James isn’t always an actor who convinces me – there can be something a little reticent about her performances – but she’s bewitchingly sinister here. Words like witch and possessed are thrown around, and Nattiv often shoots scenes as if we’re watching a horror film unfold, but things are kept at a simmer.
For the most part at least, because for all of the unusual elements – a female cult leader, relatively few mentions of religion, questions over answers – Nattiv ultimately lands in pretty standard cult movie territory. What started out as Rita’s story becomes anyone’s as familiarity takes over with an underbaked subplot involving an undercover member and a conventional race-against-time finale. At just under two hours, things also start to sag a little before a strangely rushed ending wraps things up in haste. The pre-credits text, informing us of what happened to the real Rita, is grim and shocking, but it’s that which stays with us over anything we have seen in the last act. Coon’s performance endures, an actor we typically associate with strength showing how convincingly fragile she can be. Rita might remain a maddening enigma but it’s easy to understand and appreciate the vastness of what Coon can do.
The Liberation is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released later this year
