Thirty-nine people died in a rented mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, in March of 1997, and almost thirty years later, we finally have a feature film that treats them like people instead of a punchline. That film is The Leader, written and directed by Michael Gallagher, and we caught it at Fantasia as its Canadian premiere after it world premiered at the Tribeca Festival back on June 5. We went in expecting a fairly standard cult drama. We came out kind of shaken.
If you have ever fallen down a late-night cult documentary hole (and be honest, you have), you already know the Heaven’s Gate story in outline. UFO cult, matching black tracksuits, Nike Decades, the Hale-Bopp comet, the largest mass suicide ever to take place on American soil. What you probably do not know is what it felt like from the inside, or what it looked like from the top. That is exactly where this movie plants itself.
What The Leader Is Actually About
The official synopsis is blunt to the point of being cold. In 1997, thirty-nine members of the American cult known as Heaven’s Gate committed the largest mass suicide to ever take place on American soil. This is their story. That is it.
Arthur asked the obvious question during our chat, wondering if the film plays out “almost like a docuseries type of thing, not a series but like almost a documentary?” Meaghan pushed back on that, and she is right to.
I mean no, not really. Like we don’t know what all the conversations were that happened. Although I do believe that they probably took pains to recreate some archival footage.
So this is a dramatization with documentary bones. Gallagher clearly did his homework, and the recreations of Applewhite’s videotaped sermons land with an uncanny accuracy that will make your skin crawl if you have seen the real ones. The rest is filled in.
What makes the structure interesting is the point of view. Most cult films hand you an innocent, walk them into the compound, and let you watch the walls close. The Leader does not do that. We spend the bulk of the runtime with Bonnie Nettles, following her from dissatisfied nurse, wife, and mother in early seventies Texas to co-founder of a doomsday religion. Arthur called it exactly what it is:
That’s a crazy 180 but alright.
The film chronicles that turn without flinching and without excusing it. You watch a woman decide, incrementally, that she is something more than human, and you watch other people agree with her.
Tim Blake Nelson and Vera Farmiga Carry The Leader
The writing is solid. The performances are the reason to buy a ticket.
Tim Blake Nelson plays Marshall Applewhite, known inside the group as Do. You know his face even if the name takes a second (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Minority Report, Syriana, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the guy has been quietly everywhere for twenty-five years). Here he is playing a man who is charming, wounded, deeply sad, and completely certain, sometimes inside the same scene. It is a performance built on total conviction, which is the only way a role like this works.
Vera Farmiga plays Bonnie Nettles, known as Ti, and she is the engine of the whole thing. Farmiga was at our screening, which was a small thrill we are still not over.
She walked right by me, she seemed lovely.
On screen, she is anything but lovely, and that contrast is part of what makes the performance so effective. Nettles was, by most accounts, the reason Heaven’s Gate held together as long as it did. She drew people in. She kept order. She made the absurd feel structured.
Farmiga plays her as someone who always knows exactly what she is doing, which is a far more disturbing choice than playing her as a true believer.
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Jim Parsons Is the Surprise of The Leader
We need to talk about Jim Parsons, because we did not see this coming and neither will you.
Parsons plays Warren, one of the followers, and he gives what might be the best performance in a film full of great ones. Arthur summed up the general reaction pretty well:
I don’t know why I’m surprised to hear that he’s in this.
Fair. But he has been doing serious work for years now, and a lot of people have not been paying attention because the Big Bang Theory shadow is long. This performance should fix that. He is phenomenal here, and the moments where his character’s hope curdles into something else are genuinely hard to sit with.
The supporting cast is stacked in that specific way where you keep going “oh, that person.” Simon Rex, Michael C. Hall, Grace Caroline Currey, Matthew Glave, and William Mapother all turn up as part of the group. None of them break the spell, which is harder than it sounds when you are dealing with recognizable faces playing real dead people.
Why The Leader Works as Real Life Horror
This is not a horror movie in the way we usually cover horror movies on this show. There is no monster, no supernatural element, no third act chase. It is still one of the more upsetting things we watched at the festival.
The tonal balance is the trick. There are moments of real levity in The Leader, mostly because some of what these people believed was, at surface level, ridiculous. You do not want to laugh. You laugh anyway. And then Gallagher cuts to something that feels like a humiliation ritual and the laugh dies in your throat.
It’s juxtaposed quite brilliantly with a moment almost immediately after that makes you uncomfortable.
Arthur nailed the mechanism behind it:
That’s how it works, right? We’ve watched a couple of documentaries of how these things get formed and you have to break down the person to then build them up and that’s exactly what it sounds like.
That is the whole playbook, and the film shows it operating in real time rather than explaining it to you. The sexual repression inside the group gets a real look too. Members were told desire was damaging their vehicle, which is what the cult called the human body, since the body was just transport for a spirit that would eventually ascend. Some members took extremely permanent steps to solve that problem. The film does not sensationalize it, and it does not skip it either.
The aftermath is where things get sad rather than scary. We get glimpses of the people who walked away, and we get Bonnie Nettles’ daughter, who wanted her mother back and never got closure. There is no clean resolution there because there was not one in real life.
It’s kind of unsatisfying to a degree because this happened and it was horrible.
The Leader Release Date and Where You Can Watch It
Good news on this one. The Leader has distribution locked for the UK through Altitude Films and for Canada through Sphere Films, with US deals in motion. Given the cast, we would be shocked if this did not get at least a limited theatrical run, and a wider one would not surprise us either. Names like Farmiga, Nelson, and Parsons put people in seats.
Keep an eye out for it. If cults, true crime, or slow institutional horror are your thing, this is a pretty easy recommendation.
Our Score for The Leader
Meaghan gave it a nine out of ten digs, and she did not hedge:
I really don’t have anything bad to say about it. It’s really good.
The one honest criticism is that it does not necessarily hand you new information about Heaven’s Gate, which is a tough ask for a story this heavily documented. What it does instead is make you sit inside it. There was never a moment where we were bored, taken out of the film, or reminded that we were watching actors.
That is the whole review, honestly. A film about the worst thing that happened in Rancho Santa Fe that never once feels like a reenactment.
We have got a lot more Fantasia coverage coming your way, including Colony, Casper Kelly’s Sundance sensation Buddy (imagine Barney horror, from the guy who made Too Many Cooks), and Freaks Part II from Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein as the closing film. We are not done yet, so stay scared and stay tuned.