![]() ![]() The film doesn’t linger on these details longer than it must, and it’s better for that. Sometimes it works, as when discussing the nastier details of Jeffs’ relationships with his untold dozens of “wives” there’s one moment when Berg blacks out the screen, and simply plays audio footage of an interaction between Warren and a 12-year-old he married that’s as revolting and deeply unsettling as anything to enter a theater in this year or any other. The film shifts narrative focuses rapidly. If nothing else, Prophet’s Prey will avail you of just how many FLDS businesses exist, and how frightening their system of heavily unpaid labor and funneled profits really is. And the most riveting portions of Berg’s film are those in which she attempts to break down the elaborate cash flows that keep the FLDS capable of taking over entire towns and erecting encampments through which to continue the practices of separating families based on holy terror. Prophet’s Prey follows all this carefully, never outright condemning the larger Church of Latter-Day Saints despite the hoary Mormon polygamy jokes you still hear to this day in some circles, it’s not generally the larger faith still engaging in these illegal practices. The film, however, is built mostly from these interviews, as little more than a series of Warren’s nightmarish recorded sermons has escaped for public consumption.Įven when Jeffs eventually found himself on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list, right between Osama Bin Laden and Whitey Bulger, he continued with business as usual. Church defectors like the son of current FLDS leader Lyle Jeffs and one of Jeffs’ estimated 78 wives (many of whom were taken forcibly, to say nothing of underage) speak of the tyrannical regime he created, one that relied on relentless and constant indoctrination from birth and the fear of God’s violent, vicious reprisal (usually manifested in the form of Jeffs himself) to keep those within the congregation as obedient as possible. The film argues that Jeffs was a tyrant from the moment he began to ascend under his father, and needed only for the elder Jeffs to pass so that he could inherit not only a harem of wives, but also power.Īlso much like Going Clear, the secretive nature of the FLDS to this day means that Berg can only offer so much testimony as to what happened at any of the FLDS’ many encampments, from Utah to South Dakota to Texas, all in the middle of nowhere and funded by Jeffs’ frequent demands of church members’ entire paychecks as an acceptable tithe under God and church. Like this year’s Going Clear, another in-depth exploration of the point at which a religion sustained by the will of a single man lapses into the abuses of cult, Prophet’s Prey is a case study covering untold years of sexual, mental, and physical abuse largely protected by the American right to the free demonstration of religious belief. Where the urge, somewhat understandably, has long been to paint Jeffs’ exploits as a lurid tabloid story of fringe religious sects gone horribly awry, Prophet’s Prey focuses on what it must : on Jeffs, on the things he’s done, and on the continuous revelations that have kept his name in the news, time and again.Īmy Berg, who’s spent much of the past decade analyzing abused youth and the social systems that wrong them from the legal ( West of Memphis ) to the Catholic Church ( Deliver Us From Evil ), focuses here on the (eerily) still-active FLDS. Prophet’s Prey is hardly the first documentary to chronicle the many sins committed by former Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) leader Warren Jeffs, but it’s among the most comprehensive and disturbing.
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