The Vow

There is a lot of good footage, audio recordings, and interviews that help tell the story. The subject matter is fairly interesting, and I do think it's a story worth telling. The problem is that it's disorganized and could use a heavy edit.

Like so many modern docuseries, this feels stretched. The time jumps are odd, and often the scenes feel random and disjointed. You can watch a scene and be left to wonder, "So when did that happen?" because it will be following some footage from 2005 or a phone call recording from 2010. It still works, sort of, but you know it could be so much better if they dropped the fluff and told the story in a direct way.

The story of NXIVM is massive. It's impossible for every notable detail to make the final cut. That said, there are some omissions that seem significant. For example, investigative journalist Frank Parlato, who has written extensively about NXIVM over the years, is mentioned in early episodes and characterized as someone who isn't always viewed as credible. But in the seventh episode, Parlato becomes a supporting figure in the series as he helps actress Catherine Oxenberg, whose daughter India refuses to leave NXIVM, in her attempt to get law enforcement involved in the situation. Given all the evidence Parlato has compiled and his willingness to help, he comes across as semi-heroic, albeit eccentric. A visit to his website, the Frank Report, reveals that it's filled with reporting on NXIVM but also posts written by Roger Stone and at least one defense of QAnon, a juxtaposition that caused so much cognitive dissonance in my brain that it turned into a popping-confetti cannon. While it's understandable that Noujaim and Amer decided that a whole sidebar on Parlato would be too distracting, this still raises the question of what other notable information or nuances may have been sliced out of the series.

Ironically, the recent focus in the news on the cultlike believers in QAnon conspiracy theories makes The Vow an especially relevant watch. While NXIVM coaches often preached the notion that trusting one's intuition can be misleading - "Your intuition was just a feeling, a viscera," Bonnie Piesse says in the second episode - the series is a testimony to how vital it is to check one's gut and apply real, unvarnished critical thinking to events unfolding around us. Any of us can potentially have the wool pulled over our eyes by a dude who calls himself Vanguard, or anonymous online posters, or even a president. It's what we do after we realize our vision has been obscured that truly defines whether we're good or bad, and whether we're safe or still in grave danger.

I'm so disturbed how some reviews are absolutely cruel and missing what a review is to provide. This is not a forum to criticize people who had the courage to come forward and own their mistakes. Cults are abundant and they come in many tricky forms. As we look at our society today, especially now, there are too many unhappy and unfulfilled people trying to find purpose. This is a symptom of our diseased culture lauding material gain as success and how social media is chipping away personal dignity via being liked. The Vow reveals anyone can be a victim, regardless of background.

While the series has plenty of recorded phonecalls, recordings and interviews with people who were involved with - and since escaped - the organisation, the series lack of proper pacing trips it up. There is no straight timeline being followed, but instead it steadily introduces more people and might then go back to previous events we have already seen because these newly introduced figures were also involved in that. This leads to topics switching quite randomly. As such the series might struggle to hold your attention past your innate interest in seeing where things go in the end. In conclusion the series seem to portray events accurately enough, however it meanders too much and doesn't have a defined 'thread' you can follow that will keep you in suspense. I would put this slightly above average 6 episodes in.

Too many episodes... They made 10 "ok" episodes instead of making four really good episodes that had just enough coverage and length.. Instead, it kind of drags on and doesn't really grab me as much due to the repetitiveness of it. It's still pretty good, mainly due to the large collection of recorded calls, but it could have benefited from more brevity.