Editor’s Observe: This evaluate was revealed in the course of the 2023 Sundance Movie Pageant. “Aum: The Cult on the Finish of the World” opens in theaters March 19, 2025 and launches on PVOD March 28.
It’s simple to grasp why true-crime documentaries about cults have turn out to be so in style in a streaming age that will depend on a relentless stream of recent (however dependable) content material: Each one in every of these tales is completely different, and each one in every of these tales can be the identical.
That double actuality has seldom been extra dramatic than it’s in Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto’s chilling however self-divided “Aum: The Cult on the Finish of the World.” An American-Japanese collaboration that refracts the 1995 sarin fuel assault on the Tokyo subway by way of native and international lenses on the similar time, this well-sourced look again on the situations that allowed for such a horrible act of bio-terrorism is flattened into an infinite corridor of mirrors that shines a brighter gentle on the movie’s personal sub-genre than it does on the legacy of the Aum Shinrikyo cult itself.
Then once more, it’s potential to see two issues as one and the identical. The method by which {a partially} blind youngster named Chizuo Matsumoto rebranded himself because the messianic guru Shoko Asahara — remodeling his new age yoga group into Japan’s most infamous doomsday cult, and his adherents into non secular zealots alongside the best way — is nothing if not crushingly acquainted. A bullied youngster from a poor household who bore him right into a poisonous lavatory post-war resentment, Asahara preyed on probably the most weak folks he might discover.
In his early twenties, Asahara offered “miracle cures” to previous individuals who needed to consider that consuming tangerine rinds would remedy their arthritis. By his late twenties, he started promoting the false promise of his personal religious energy to a technology that had turn out to be disillusioned by their nation’s financial increase; that had turned to the occult searching for the aim that cash couldn’t purchase, and of an antidote to the individualism that it price in return.
Asahara made absurd, seemingly “Akira”-inspired claims concerning the psychic talents that his teachings might unlock, his proof amounting to some cut-rate anime propaganda — the model of which is cleverly repurposed in the course of the animated segments of this documentary — and a single {photograph} of the “guru” sitting cross-legged a foot above the bottom with a constipated look of (bodily) exertion scrunched throughout his lifelong babyface. However Aum Shinrikyo rapidly sank its fangs into anybody who responded to the bait with even the slightest nibble, encouraging them to chop off contact with their households, forfeit their cash to the group, and reject the behaviors that it made it potential for them to interface with the skin world. Little sleep. Much less meals. No bathing.
When Asahara’s 1990 marketing campaign for seats in Japan’s Home of Representatives led to public humiliation, he pivoted his cult in a extra violent route, finally seizing on the chaos that adopted the collapse of the Soviet Union to ascertain a foothold in Russia and acquire entry to their wildly unregulated weapons provide. His solely actual superpowers have been the flexibility to acknowledge the voids created by an unstable world, the shamelessness required to take advantage of them, and the cartoon-sized charisma that allowed him to do each of these issues in plain sight. On TV. The place a lot of the nation noticed him as extra of a clown than an existential menace, and the media couldn’t bear to confront the monster that it had helped to create (pour one out for talk-show-host-turned-auteur Takeshi Kitano, who this doc paints because the Jimmy Fallon to Asahara’s Donald Trump).
Loosely primarily based on David. E Kaplan and Andrew Marshall’s guide “The Cult on the Finish of the World,” and that includes each of these authors amongst its small however authoritative roster of speaking heads, “Aum” tells a depressingly acquainted story alongside depressingly acquainted strains. The studied confidence with which first-time administrators Braun and Yanagimoto prepare their movie displays the previous’s expertise as Senior Vice President at Submarine Deluxe (the place he government produced the likes of “Crip Camp” and “Hearth of Love”), however such a clear meeting of archival footage, retrospective interviews, and ominous suggestion can’t assist however make “Aum” appear a bit overdetermined to show this story’s most self-evident level, which is that historical past repeats itself by disguising itself as one thing new.
A part of the issue stems from one of many movie’s largest strengths: Its resolution to lean on Marshall as its main supply, to the purpose that the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist practically assumes the function of a narrator. A gaijin whose international POV could have allowed him to acknowledge a few of the blind spots that the Japanese press missed (and the Japanese police ignored) within the build-up to the subway assault, Marshall was actively investigating a sarin leak in Matsumoto in the course of the first months of 1995, and his invaluable perspective on the occasions that adopted permits this movie to look again at its central tragedy from underground and 30,000 ft on the similar time.
However the movie struggles to reconcile that split-view right into a single imaginative and prescient, as Marshall’s journalistic ethos naturally emphasizes the details of the matter over the emotional fallout that it left behind. Privileging him because the movie’s most frequent voice factors “Aum” in direction of a Western viewers to the purpose that it begins to obfuscate the specifics of Aum Shinrikyo’s enchantment, and muddle our understanding of how Japanese society enabled (and responded to) the assault.
Which isn’t to counsel that “Aum” skimps on Japanese voices, or that it sidesteps an anticipated fascination with the morbid particulars of Asahara’s cult. Former members of Aum Shinrikyo are available to supply their very own private testimony, as are mother and father whose kids have been indoctrinated into the group, along with journalists who have been attacked with sarin fuel across the time of the subway incident and attorneys whose colleague was kidnapped — alongside along with his spouse and toddler son — when the general public first recognized Aum as an issue within the late Nineteen Eighties.
Braun and Yanagimoto’s movie makes frighteningly clear that Aum was a neighborhood menace lengthy earlier than they turned notorious on the world stage, and the entire documentary’s most painful episodes middle on the semi-forgotten individuals who died earlier than the police have been compelled to take the cult significantly; not a millisecond of this film is concentrated on the precise victims of the subway assault, however there’s a heartbreaking chapter about Yoshiyuki Kono, who was falsely blamed for the take a look at run that killed seven folks (together with his spouse and two canines) in Matsumoto the earlier 12 months.
Braun and Yanagimoto’s best coup, nevertheless, ought to have been the participation of the cult’s former spokesman — and Asahara’s favourite “son” — Fumihiro Joyu, who appears completely keen to debate his reminiscences of Aum, and does so with none discernible hint of disgrace or regret. Or, for that matter, any honest perception in his guru’s “teachings.” The confessional nature of his interview footage guarantees a mea culpa that by no means comes (a realization that arrives with a touch of the testimony that Joshua Oppenheimer impressed from Anwar Congo in “The Act of Killing”), however Joyu’s evasively boastful declaration that he’s the most-hated man in Japan falls flat as a result of the movie round him provides so little context for that assertion.
Is that an correct declare, or an Asahara-like occasion of messianic self-inflation? And what does it reveal concerning the present state of cults in Japan that Joyu continues to guide a much less resourceful model of the group that Asahara left behind? For the entire impeccable analysis behind it — and the wealth of disquieting footage that brings its most upsetting discoveries to gentle — Braun and Yanagimoto’s movie is frustratingly shortsighted concerning the societal situations that allowed Aum to thrive in public for therefore lengthy. Loads of fingers are pointed, however most of them solely in passing.
Possibly the administrators suspect that we’ve all come to grasp them on some degree, or possibly they have been only a bit too seduced by the spine-tingling specifics which have made us hooked on tales like this, even when it’s actually only one story advised a thousand alternative ways. It’s true sufficient that the variations between fashionable historical past’s deadliest pyramid schemes largely boil all the way down to scale, however “Aum: The Cult on the Finish of the World” solely hints on the distinctive vacancy that swells inside every one in every of them, the movie vaguely alluding to the identical ominous voids that the entire world’s most harmful individuals are someplace on the market doing their greatest to fill.
Grade: C+
“Aum: The Cult on the Finish of the World” premiered on the 2023 Sundance Movie Pageant. Greenwich Leisure opens the movie in theaters March 19, 2025 earlier than a PVOD launch March 28.