Film Review: "My Scientology Movie" (2015).

From the director of Bradley Wiggins: A Year in Yellow comes My Scientology Movie. This British documentary film directed by John Dower, and written by Louis Theroux, who also stars. Theroux is denied admittance into the Church of Scientology's headquarters, setting into motion a clever, confrontational and funny plan to try and reveal the inner workings of the mysterious organization.

Theroux had long sought to make a documentary about the Church of Scientology from the inside but was repeatedly refused by church officials. In 2011 his producer, Simon Chinn, suggested making a ninety-minute feature about Scientology. Together with Dower, they looked for ways to make a documentary – working title Stairway to Heaven: Louis Theroux and the Church of Scientology – without access to its subjects. They wanted to avoid formulae that had been used by previous film-makers, such as interviews with ex-members intercut with archive footage and re-enactments, or an "in search of" approach documenting the fruitless quest to gain access. They eventually hit upon the idea of "negative access", illustrating the church by provoking a reaction from it. Theroux and his team sought to take "inspiration from the show business trappings of Scientology itself". With the help of various actors, they recreated events related by ex-members in the church's Gold Base and its punishment facility, The Hole. The ex-members who related these events helped to direct the scenes, which were filmed on soundstages in Hollywood. In conjunction with the former senior Scientology official Mark Rathbun, who is now one of the church's most prominent critics, he held auditions for about 30 young actors to play parts depicting church leader David Miscavige and its most famous member, Tom Cruise. In the process, "the documentary became a film about me trying to make the re-enactments". Theroux took inspiration from a film that he had recently seen, Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary The Act of Killing, which featured Indonesian genocidaires re-enacting their crimes for the camera. Within a couple of months of the start of filming, the film-makers found themselves under constant surveillance. The church mounted a campaign of harassment against the film-makers which drew "all kinds of stalker-ish emissaries and cranks out of the woodwork, not one of them doing much to reassure us that Scientology is in fact cuddly, socially progressive or misunderstood." They found themselves pursued "in broad daylight by mysterious cars with tinted windows". Occasionally they had face-to-face confrontations with camera-toting pursuers which they filmed in turn, so that "half the film consists of cameras pointing at other cameras, like an absurdist gunfight at dawn, with neither side willing to holster." They also received numerous letters from Scientology lawyers. Theroux found this behaviour very strange.

A compelling documentary which doesn't need to work too hard to out the sheer absurdity and 'Emperor's New Clothes' air that hangs over the whole Scientology movement. The picture it manages to assemble packs such a punch that it gives new meaning to "going clear." Jaw-dropping, indeed. This is a shocking, well-documented expose of scientology, it's teachings and practices, especially its history of retaliation against whistleblowers.

Simon says My Scientology Movie receives: