Utopia
There’s a fascination with cults in popular culture, because there’s this feeling that we all have that ‘hey, we’d never got caught up in anything like that, right?’ attitude. And to see people under the sway of some charismatic leader or mysterious mission, people that might seem otherwise normal, alongside the oddballs, that’s compelling.
Some cults are inherently more dangerous than others, although the nature of one is manipulation and isolation from regular society. But naturally, the definition of each of those cults is in the eye of the beholder, as many prefer to defend the groups as something legitimate or honest … even if that’s nonsense.
Adventures in Success is an indie film from director Jay Buim (in his first feature film) and co-written with Susan Juvet and Rachel Gayle Webster. The movie shares the same name as the 1983 song by Will Powers, but I don’t know if that’s intentional — what is intentional is that the movie is inspired by a real life start-up that was oddly about erotic massage before getting shut down by the FBI for sex trafficking (maybe or maybe not reasonably).
Here the movie follows a small group that certainly is cult-like, a group of men and women following their leader Peggy (Lexie Mountain), with a mission deep with spirituality to ‘heal’ Mother Earth through the release of female pleasure in particular. They have their little compound near a town in the Catskills, and the movie cuts back and forth between the actions of the group and the various townspeople and their opinions about the so-called cult.
It is ostensibly a mockumentary-styled thing, but the movie does break this conceit a few times, I think unintentionally — it’s a tricky thing to keep consistent. Mostly we follow a few of the particular folk and their connection to the mission, including a few ‘pleasure’ sessions that are just up to the explicit line. The movie also intentionally embraces surreality and a low energy vibe, which certainly means that this movie will not appeal to a lot of people.
The gang wants to spread their message past the fairly small group, which also includes raising funds, but naturally they face complications and roadblocks all the time. There’s a sort of awkward comedy to these moments, sometimes also coming from a bunch of the off-putting people having their weird conversations together.
Watching the manipulations of these people is probably the most interesting part for me, as the comedy mostly fell flat on my part — but obviously that’s a pretty subjective thing. From a performance perspective, the actors were pretty good at playing non-actor regular people — there’s a lived in awkwardness that felt pretty real to me.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that I recommend this movie to most people, but there’s probably an intersection of hippie feminist folk with indie mockumentary vibes that this will appeal too — I’m thinking specifically of my aunt, who I bet would get a kick out of this. So if you also have an aunt like that, maybe tell her about this one.
Adventures in Success has a run time of 1 hour 38 minutes and is not rated.
Utopia
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