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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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\u2019re haunted by her actions.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The film flips back and forth between the gradual, awful grooming process as Rita spends more and more time with Ricky\u2019s 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\u2019t know if the timeline-switching really adds all that much, a common complaint at the moment, but it\u2019s less distractingly gimmicky and more inconsequential.<\/p>\n