The Liberation is a story of personalities. How they’re formed and where they might lead us. How they clash or meld with others’, how they change over time. It’s also a personal story. It’s co-writer and director Guy Nattiv (Golda, Tatami) real-life story of his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who in the 1980s left her family to join the all-female Harmonia commune cult.
Carrie Coon joins a cult
Rita (Carrie Coon) is a middle manager working a demanding yet boring bank job. At home are her daughters – the feisty, independent Ella (Bella Ramsey) and relaxed, impressionable Jo (Odessa Young) – Rita’s warm but humdrum husband Reuben (played by Coon’s real-life husband, Tracy Letts), plus her aged, ailing father.
But Nattiv doesn’t start his story here. We start with Ella and Jo driving cross-country to visit their mother, living in a secluded commune, having told the tried-and-teenage excuse about where they were really spending the night: a friend’s. The film flits back and forth between the two timelines: Rita’s introduction to cult leader Ricki (Lily James) for whom she’ll leave her family, and the girls’ trip to Ricki’s commune where Rita’s been living for two years.
This structure removes the ‘will she or won’t she join?’ question from the get-go, prompting instead the more interesting: why? Why would someone abandon their loving family for a remote life like this?
The film explores two main ‘whys’. The first is in the film’s supporting lead: the cult leader herself, James’ Ricki King. The second is Rita herself, and how her traumatic childhood and plateauing mid-life primes her to be exploited by King’s vacuous charisma.
A cliché leader
There are a few choices facing any filmmakers creating a cult leader – some decisions are made in the script, others in the performance. How do you show their charlatanism without straining the credibility of the follower’s choice to join her? And how, if at all, will you differentiate this leader from other screen portrayals – particularly the Manson archetype in the public imagination?
Nattiv, co-writer Noa Berman-Herzberg and James get it half right. On the face of it (literally) James‘ beauty alone half justifies her casting. A female leader, recruiting exclusively women, she embodies the ‘harmony, friendship and truth’ she claims to be able to share with her followers – a beautiful face embodying this is half the battle. But James’ performance sticks to the tired hippy-dippy, away with the fairies, Manson-girl approach.
James is limited by there being a real Ricki, though how much Nattiv knew or shared with the actress about the real-life King is unclear. In any case, the result is a character that leans heavily on cliché. The film is less interested in exploring what made Ricki so alluring (Beyond her looks, did she use her femininity to expand her followers? What set her apart from other charismatic leaders?) instead relying on the 1970s cult cutout.
Kernels of truth
Ricki’s allure comes from the kernels of truth within her beliefs – kernels that all viable cults need to work. ‘Half a truth,’ Benjamin Franklin said, ‘is often a great lie.’ So Ricki tells Rita that her smoking is bad for her. That junk food’s bad for her. Maybe not all of her medication is necessary. And did she know that magic mushrooms make you feel good? Cults like Harmonia identify real problems only to offer simple analyses and remedies to people’s complex problems. Her beauty and the truths slipped into the lies make up most of Ricki’s allure lies.
It’s good, then, that Rita holds up her end of the bargain as the victim. Coon’s Rita is a more convincing follower than James’ King is a leader. In fact, Rita might be tailored made for the job. A tragic childhood, a hard but boring job, a middle-aged plateauing, low self esteem. She marks herself out as a clear potential victim so clearly that Ricki barely needs a look to see her and sink in her claws.
Trauma relived
The film sets Rita’s history out early, smartly grasping our sympathy from the jump. Finally taking up an invitation from a local Holocaust memorial centre to speak about her childhood – in which, as a Jewish family in Europe, her mother and sisters were murdered by the Nazis – Rita barely starts before a panic attack and quick exit interrupt.
In the shifting structure, the film places these insights into Rita’s past next to what happens in her future. We see Rita’s (renamed ‘Gaia’ by King) physical change. Her short-cropped hair, simple handmade dresses and gaunt face and frame invite comparison to her past. Is she trying to somehow relive a go back to the past? To take the place of her sisters and change the past by re-enacting it? Has she fallen for a faux liberation of the self to erroneously atone for the liberation that came too late for her mother and sisters?
Ramsey’s Ella, who sees through King’s nonsense, might not see this, but she does see a mother she misses, a hoodwinked mother, a mother retreating beneath the warm blanket of ignorance. Ella is the audience’s avatar, providing an outlet for the audience’s frustration at Rita’s seduction by expressing it with the charm-tinted teenage stropiness Ramsey showed in The Last of Us.
Coon’s ‘Gaia’ is half sedate, half needy daughter to Ricki’s mother. She wants to please surrogate mother (female leader as mother?), asking her permission for each small thing, so when she’s forced to retake the reins of mother to her daughters, she becomes scared, confused and desperate. An tragic past exploited to make the present seem tragic, leading to a tragic future.
Conclusion
The Liberation wants to explore how people’s pasts, and the personalities they shape, can make them vulnerable to exploitation. It only half succeeds. The examination of the exploited side, through Coon’s Rita, is moving and realistic. But the exploiter side falls short in James’ King, who is an under-explored, disappointing cliché of a 70s-style cult leader.
The Liberation will be released in the US on January 8 2027.
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