Review: ‘The Liberation’ gave me the wrong takeaway about cults

If I were ever asked to show a movie that demonstrated exactly why and how people join cults, I would put on The Liberation.

Loosely based on Guy Nattiv’s (Golda, Skin) grandmother, The Liberation moves back and forth between two time periods: when Rita (Carrie Coon, The Gilded Age) was a troubled Holocaust survivor living a normal life, working at a bank with a husband and two daughters, and, later, as Naia, a shell of a person living on a hippie cult compound under the harsh rules of Ricki (Lily James, Pam & Tommy). In the present, in the early ’80s, her daughters (Bella Ramsey and Odessa Young) hope to rescue her, while in the past they helplessly watch her drift away. 

Everything about the cult is textbook, from the way Ricki finds her way into Rita’s life to the initial thrill of being recognized as special and how Ricki separates Rita from her family. Even the generic hippie beliefs, like not using medication and moving to a rural compound, are generic. While Nattiv lightly touches on a few more provocative ideas, such as a romantic attraction between the two women and the cult filling a genuine hole in Rita’s life that traditional familial stability doesn’t, The Liberation has little interest in probing deeper. Its two-timeline structure also offers no real dramatic revelations, either. 

What The Liberation has, though, is two fantastic leads. Carrie Coon delivers a big, swinging, Oscar-worthy performance. Character actors like her don’t often get to take the stage like this, and Coon takes every chance to show she’s one of the best working actors out there.

But Lily James is the real revelation. Her Ricki is seductive yet scary, manipulative yet comes across as genuine. She takes what is a pretty typical cult leader role on paper and gives it dimensionality. I walked away with the clearly wrong takeaway that it didn’t seem so bad to join her lesbian sex cult, do psychedelic mushrooms, and dance naked in the woods. As long as you don’t have a chronic health condition or care about giving her all your money, it seems a lot more fun than the normal drudgery of life. 

There’s nothing bad about The Liberation; it just doesn’t have much meat on the bones after absorbing the two lead performances. You can watch it and not regret it, but it won’t haunt you the way it should.