Escaping the NXIVM Cult: A Mother's Fight to Save Her Daughter

I liked the end of this film but of all the crap that happened, everyone should be living in a group home. That man shouldn't be living the rest of his life in prison, no, he should be chopped into little pieces & fed to stray dogs on the streets or in the prison cell!

Last night at 8 p.m. I watched a Lifetime movie that's the first in a month-long series called "Ripped from the Headlines!" (though they've certainly done fact-based films before this, some of them quite good), which got shot under the clunky title "The NXIVM Cult: A Mother's Nightmare" and was shown under the even clunkier title "Escaping the NXIVM Cult: A Mother's Fight to Save Her Daughter." The non-fiction book it was based on was simply called "Captive," which would have worked better for the film, and was written by Catherine Oxenberg. She was apparently the product of a minor noble family in Europe who came to the U.S., pursued a career as an actress and got a small but recurring role on the TV series "Dynasty." As the film opens she and her daughter India (Jasper Polish) are living in a large home in Malibu that looks like it was built by someone out of an all-white Lego set, and India's dad is in the picture but Catherine is in the process of divorcing him and raising India and her two younger sisters Remy (Gabrielle Trudel) and Francesca (Isabelle D. Trudel - well, that's one way of making your cast members look like sisters: cast real-life sisters!) as a single parent. She's also trying to break out of acting and into writing by selling a screenplay called "Royal Exiles," and when a neighbor tells her about a new self-help seminar called ESP - which here stands for "Executive Success Program" - Catherine not only goes herself but takes her daughter.

Catherine is put off by the overall air of the event - particularly the veneration with which the people running the seminar speak of the "Vanguard," their term for the CEO of ESP, and the way the people running it wear different-colored sashes to signify how far up in the program they've risen, sort of like the different-colored belts in Japanese martial arts. But India comes out of the program with goop-eyed admiration and within a couple of commercial breaks she's signed up for the $2,500 advanced training available only at the Albany, New York headquarters of ESP's parent company, NXIVM. India gets sucked in farther and farther into what we're beginning to realize is a particularly nasty cult built around Keith Raniere (Peter Facinelli, who previously played an equally slimy 1-percenter on the TV series "Supergirl"), a scam artist and, eventually, a sexual pervert as well. As presented in both the dramatization and the documentary, NXIVM wasn't a "cult" in the sense of offering a religious or quasi-religious belief system, but Raniere seems to have pulled together aspects of a lot of other private mind-control operations, including L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology and the 1970's operation EST. It also uses a tactic from ordinary multi-level marketing: the people in NXIVM were pressured into recruiting their family members, friends and anyone else into the program, and were given a commission on the course fees paid by anyone they signed up. All of this could probably have stayed under the radar of the authorities for years except that, like many a cult leader before him, Raniere started indulging himself sexually, and like such other cult-leading horndogs as Charles Manson, Jim Jones, David Koresh and Warren Jeffs, he indoctrinated his top women staffers to think that servicing him sexually was the highest honor he and his organization could give them.

If there's a flaw with "Escaping the NXIVM Cult" it's that a 90-minute Lifetime time slot (two hours less commercials) simply isn't enough for this fascinating story. Writer Adam Mazer and director Lisa Robinson compress the time frame from seven years to two. We really don't get the insight we want into why India Oxenberg fell so hard for NXIVM's line of B.S. - though the one thing they do for her in the real world is buy her a coffeehouse to run after her previous attempt at a home-based muffin-baking business had gone nowhere - and I also found myself wondering how India's two younger sisters handled being increasingly neglected by their mom as she conducted her obsessive quest to bring her oldest daughter back from the cult. (It's probably much the way the non-prodigal brother of the prodigal son felt when the prodigal returned and their dad brought out the fatted calf.) Nonetheless, "Escaping the NXIVM Cult" emerged as strong drama and evidence that cults are functioning now, and they're getting slicker and subtler, locating in and among suburban neighborhoods and blending in instead of living in clapboard houses in the middle of nowhere and wearing robes. Had Ranieri been a bit smarter and less sex-obsessed, he probably could have kept the organization going to the end of his life and even beyond, as L. Ron Hubbard and his successor David Miscavige have done with Scientology.

No, seriously, WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

Most people (but certainly not all) my age went through the whole cult stupidity in the 1970s when glittery-eyed friends came back from an evening of not urinating and shouting "I got it" with Werner Erhard. They then watched those friends tank promising careers and disappear into a series of increasingly stupid human potential classes to "get it."

NXIVM is est, Amway, $cientology, LulaRich, the Big Lié, Mary Kay, etc., but with sex. Lots of sex. It involves the same love bombing, confessional/extortion, pop psychology, manipulation and guru. Just give us your money, sell our products and we will TRANSFORM you.

And, they all went back again and again to be told that they "just weren't doing it right, but we are the only ones who can show you how to do it."

This show dramatizes the material HBO set forth in "The Vow," as well as similar documentary series by STARZ, CNBC, NBC, BBC, and other networks. It is taken directly from Catherine Oxenberg's book, "Captive: A Mother's Crusade to Save Her Daughter." This seems to be a movie for people who don't read or watch documentaries.

For most of us, this particular cult seems like it targets wealthy young women who have too much money and no meaning in their lives. Had they been taught something more than exercising, make up and conspicuous consumption, maybe they wouldn't be so empty. People with bills and deadlines don't have the money to give to gurus, and, if they were tempted, might think twice about giving away something it took them so long to earn.

My low rating is for the soapy way the story is told.

You can't have a cult without gullible people. Likewise, you can't have a great movie without good acting and professional cinematography. This film lacks both.

I'm sure Catherine Oxenberg's real life experience of trying to free her daughter from a horrific sex cult was a dramatic, emotionally harrowing experience. You will find none of that experience here. The film lacks any urgency or sense of terror. It offers practically no insight into just how horrific this cult was supposed to be. The documentary that followed the film offered more insight in just an hour! The film also did not effectively convey timeframe. In real life Catherine Oxenberg herself was in the cult for 2 years and then her daughter was in it for 6. The movie made it seem as if it all happened in a year or so. There was a lot of talking about what was happening but the movie never really showed anything and didn't delve deeply into the subject matter. As a result, the whole movie just seems superficial and doesn't make the viewer have a clear or deep understanding of the leaders motivations and why and how the women were so completely won over by the cult and so devoted to it.

As for the acting...well! Andrea Roth looks and sounds NOTHING like Catherine Oxenberg! I thought she had an Australian accent at some points and she seemed to have some kind of filler Botox situation going on, because her expression NEVER changed throughout the movie! I guess this type of movie is already difficult to make believable because of the famous real life people involved such as Catherine Oxenberg and her husband Casper Van Dien. But, seeing unconvincing actors portray them makes for a jarring, weird experience. I kept wishing Catherine Oxenberg, an actress in her own right, would have portrayed herself. I guess that was something she didn't feel like reliving, but nothing really dramatic or traumatic actually happens onscreen anyway. Joan and Melissa Rivers, Patty Duke, and a few others have played themselves in movies about traumatic things that happened in there life.

In the end, this movie was not dramatic enough to be captivating, and not campy and lurid enough to be the so bad its good Lifetime movie you want. Skip the movie and watch the documentary instead.