Savage Messiah

I happen to know that this film was shot in about 18 days and was extremely low budget. This makes you appreciate even greater the talent of the director who obviously had very few tools to play around with, except for the actors. This is a powerfull film which has been powerfully directed. My marks are 8+ out of 10 and the only reason why I do not give it full marks is because it deserved some more money to be put on screen, and then it would have been so much greater I'm sure.

An excellent, thought provoking film. Well acted throughout, disturbing at times, you feel for the characters. The theme of spousal/partner abuse is primary here, and I do not believe I have ever seen a better description of the "battered spouse" syndrome on film.

While this movie obviously didn't have a 50 million dollar budget, the results do not suffer. Brilliant and highly recommended.

This excellent drama is one of the best films about a cult that I have seen since the early eighties (SPLIT IMAGE and TICKET TO HEAVEN spring to mind from that era). The supporting performance by Quebecois actress Isabelle Blais is Oscar-worthy. Her portrayal of a brainwashed woman who finally sees the light is the film's most memorable aspect, but all of the performances are top notch.

The subject matter of the film is pretty gritty, compelling stuff. It was very hard to watch at times. The main character, the commune leader is played perfectly by Luc Picard. He's EXTREMELY creepy, and gets creepier as his world starts to fall apart. The courtroom sequence where one of the little girls tells in explicit detail the kind of debauchery that's been passing for recreational activity at the commune is absolutely disgusting. The cult leader's final attempts to regain control of his commune are deeply disturbing.

There's something unique about Canadian films. The early Cronenberg films had it... like Rabid, Scanners and Videodrome. Strange Brew had it. This movie has bags of it. It's kind of a 16mm vibe. There are also scenes that are simple and yet brutally honest that are used to develop character, break the tension and probably fill out a lean script. For instance, there's a scene in a bar where a group of women are hanging out. One of the women begins to tell a story about going out to find a man for the night. She's pretty obnoxious about it, using a lot of colorful language to describe her sexual needs. This story goes on and on, much longer than it would in any Hollywood film, but therein lies the real entertainment here.

Savage Messiah is a true story. The story of a Canadian social worker, once beaten by her husband, who discovers the women and children of a small commune are being abused by their leader. This leader, it turns out, calls himself Moses and has made the nine women living with him his concubines, mistreating them in the most violent ways.

This story made quite a lot of noise when it came out during the late eighties, both in Ontario and Quebec, especially because of the cruelty of the acts involved and the outrageous control "Moses" (Roch Thériault) had on "his" people.

While attempting to depict, sometimes with success, how it was like to live on the Church River commune, the movie mostly follows, in a very straightforward way, the social worker who discovers the truth and tries to make everything stop. Thus, it very soon starts to resemble these true stories often seen on tv on Friday night. Of course, the budget here is a little bigger, and the actors quite a bit more talented, but apart from that it just feels like a big made-for-tv movie, very easy to follow, with its few strong emotional moments along the way, but no real character development. And although the advertising prompted the viewer to "be the judge", the movie clearly adopts a subjective point of view. In the end, it's an interesting story, although violent, but a movie that, sadly or not, will not make history.