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The Vow review – unsettling Nxivm cult series burrows under your skin

The Vow, the nine-part HBO series on the Nxivm cult, opens with footage of leader Keith Raniere, 59, in one of the group’s slickly produced marketing materials for its “executive success program”, a “methodology which “allows people to optimize their experience and behavior. Raniere’s language seems innocuous, strikingly ubiquitous – “optimization” being the common mandate for an unending cycle of purchases and self-criticisms under the guise of empowerment, not the mantra of a man convicted for racketeering and sex trafficking last year.

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The dizzying, deeply unsettling gap between Raniere’s language of self-improvement and the sadistic, predatory practices of the group he founded and led for two decades form the central mystery of The Vow, which tracks both the cult’s sanitized, new-age appeal of self-awareness (it takes several reveals to even recognize the group as a cult) and several defectors’ crusade to dismantle it.

The series, directed by film-makers Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer (The Square, The Great Hack), is the rare true crime series to mostly justify its length; it effectively if sometimes confusingly winds through a remarkable trove of primary source footage and recordings to demystify the insidious appeal of Nxivm’s devil’s bargain – how you could feel empowered while being ground down to mistake manipulation for self-improvement, to see abuse as self-control, how one ends up in a sex cult bound by forced hot iron branding and starvation diets.

It also tracks the long fight for clarity and justice. The film-makers primarily foreground the words and work of two former high-ranking Nxivm leaders: Sarah Edmondson, who ran a group center in Vancouver (the city where Smallville actor Allison Mack, who later pleaded guilty to being a “master slave” and second-in-command to Raniere, along with the actors Nicki Clyne of Battlestar Galactica and Mack’s co-star Kristin Kreuk, first attended Nxivm workshops); and Mark Vicente, Edmondson’s former business partner and Nxivm’s resident documentarian for over a decade, who viewed Raniere as his mentor. The two are backed by their spouses; Edmondson’s husband Anthony “Nippy” Ames, and Vicente’s wife Bonnie Piesse, a former Star Wars actor, who was first of the group to disavow Nxivm.

The defectors team with the former Dynasty actor Catherine Oxenberg, whose daughter India was lost in Raniere’s close orbit. Oxenberg introduced India to the group at an LA session in the early 2010s but soon soured on Nxivm’s obsessional patterns; the latter half of the series (at least, of the episodes available) focuses on Oxenberg’s quest to bring media attention to the horrors of Nxivm and legal action against the group.

But that’s the madness down the road; the first episode of the series is remarkably, given the depths of the group’s psychological fuckery, and frustratingly dry, as Vicente and Edmondson walk through what later seem like technicalities of the Nxivm “executive success program” – the strange colored sash and “stripe path”, the MLM-style expansion of Raniere’s group (indeed, Raniere’s pre-Nxivm business was an MLM called Consumers Buyline, which shuttered in 1997 after accusations of running an illegal pyramid scheme), the truth-effacing language of the program (members strive to be “integrated”, Raniere is “vanguard”, men are polyamorous “protectors” while women are emotional, unreliable, the cardinal sin of “prideful”).

It’s an underwhelming, risky start, because for the viewers who do breeze past it, things spiral astoundingly. It’s clear Raniere preyed on the human need for connection, for meaning, for a path, for what Vicente called his “deep sense of privilege that I could help people”, and there’s bottomless shock at the human brain’s capacity for rationalization. By the end of the premiere, I wondered why this had been a big story. By the third, my jaw was on the floor.

It’s a bit baffling to push the explanation of DOS – a Latin acronym allegedly meaning “Lord/Master of the Obedient Female Companions” – until the end of the second hour, as it’s the rot at the heart of Raniere’s operation. The secret group of women were bound to submission under Raniere by high-stakes “collateral” (blackmail), forced branding, starvation diets and enforced sex. As explained by several former girlfriends of Raniere and a few former DOS members, once you see the way into victims’ rationalization, gaslighting, the extent of systemically razed intuition, it’s unlikely you’ll see yourself out until the end.

The Vow benefits from a wealth of primary sources – extensive footage of Rainere throughout the years, fueled by both Nxivm’s paranoia and reverence for Raniere’s every word, and the imperative for defectors in 2017 to have their experience recorded. But the trove of archival Nxivm film deceptively muddies the timeline of the group’s development. Murky as well are the motivations for each protagonist’s former loyalty to the group, especially as more and more female members defected. Most of the characters eventually get their segment explaining their journey through Nxivm, but tucked in and among the unraveling of the DOS nightmare, it plays piecemeal, and reads as potentially going easy on the former members for the sake of the viewers’ trust.

Still, as a portrait of manipulation and, in particular, the masking of female abuse through self-effacement, the series is darkly compelling, unnerving in a way that’s hard to shake. The series’ runtime and fly-on-the-wall style in untangling Nxivm’s web of lies allows for numerous women to instill a teaching opposite Raniere’s mantra of debased enlightenment, though perhaps just as dark: that you can be convinced you’re empowered when you’re not, that you can learn to dismiss trauma until years later. How do you trust yourself? The hours-long journey into that doubt is rattling, and resonant beyond the extreme example of a cult. You can know what you’re signing up for with The Vow, but it will still get under your skin.

  • The Vow starts on HBO on 23 August with a UK date yet to be announced