The success of long-format cult-exposé documentaries like HBO’s “The Vow” and Netflix’s “Wild Wild Country” has given the cult-curious an appetite for the kind of chain-link explosion rhythms that only serials can supply. We’re primed, one might even say programmed, to expect the smallest new kink on even the oddest tangent to get ample screentime, and broader thematic arcs and major personalities to have multiple episodes over which to develop. Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto’s “Aum: The Cult At The End of The World” certainly acknowledges that there is a whole season’s worth of material in the story of the infamous cult, fully named Aum Shinrikyo, that murdered 14 people and injured 6,000 when they released sarin gas into the Tokyo subway in 1995. In trying to cram it all into one 106-minute package, however, the directors deliver a far-ranging but only fitfully revealing investigation into how Aum came into being and,...
- 1/26/2023
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Aum: The Cult at the End of the World tells the lesser-known story behind the widely covered 1995 Tokyo subway attack, the largest act of domestic terrorism in Japan’s history where sarin gas was released in the Tokyo subway system during rush hour, killing 14 people.
Chiaki Yanagimoto and Ben Braun directed Aum, which takes a deep dive into Aum Shinrikyo, the doomsday cult behind the attack, founded by Shoko Asahara, a self-claimed yogi who said he was the reincarnation of Buddha. The doc, which draws from the book about the cult by investigative journalist David E. Kaplan and Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Marshall, is told through the testimonials of characters like Fumihiro Joyu, a former Aum devotee who skirted blame for the attack, and Marshall, a British journalist living in Japan who early on rang the alarm bells about the cult.
Braun — who is the son and the nephew of Dan and Josh Braun,...
Chiaki Yanagimoto and Ben Braun directed Aum, which takes a deep dive into Aum Shinrikyo, the doomsday cult behind the attack, founded by Shoko Asahara, a self-claimed yogi who said he was the reincarnation of Buddha. The doc, which draws from the book about the cult by investigative journalist David E. Kaplan and Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Marshall, is told through the testimonials of characters like Fumihiro Joyu, a former Aum devotee who skirted blame for the attack, and Marshall, a British journalist living in Japan who early on rang the alarm bells about the cult.
Braun — who is the son and the nephew of Dan and Josh Braun,...
- 1/22/2023
- by Mia Galuppo
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
A generally compelling story with obvious contemporary and global resonances gets an unfortunately dry and surface-level retelling in Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto’s Aum: The Cult at the End of the World, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival.
The Cult at the End of the World still offers interesting details, especially at a moment when every other television documentary or docuseries seems to be cult-focused. But, especially in its homestretch, I felt like the film was awash in hastily defended conclusions and bad choices involving at least one key interview subject.
The film begins, in medias res, with the March 20, 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway, a horrifying event that left 13 people dead, thousands poisoned and — if you listen to several interview subjects and don’t require corroborating analysis — marked the conclusion of the Japanese economic resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s.
The attack was the final escalation for Aum Shinrikyo,...
The Cult at the End of the World still offers interesting details, especially at a moment when every other television documentary or docuseries seems to be cult-focused. But, especially in its homestretch, I felt like the film was awash in hastily defended conclusions and bad choices involving at least one key interview subject.
The film begins, in medias res, with the March 20, 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway, a horrifying event that left 13 people dead, thousands poisoned and — if you listen to several interview subjects and don’t require corroborating analysis — marked the conclusion of the Japanese economic resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s.
The attack was the final escalation for Aum Shinrikyo,...
- 1/21/2023
- by Daniel Fienberg
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
It’s easy to understand why true-crime documentaries about cults have become so popular in a streaming age that depends on a constant stream of new (but reliable) content: Every one of these stories is different, and every one of these stories is also the same.
That double reality has seldom been more dramatic than it is in Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto’s “Aum: The Cult at the End of the World.” An American-Japanese collaboration that refracts the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway through local and global lenses at the same time, this well-sourced look back at the conditions that allowed for such a terrible act of bio-terrorism is flattened into an infinite hall of mirrors that shines a brighter light on the film’s own sub-genre than it does on the legacy of the Aum Shinrikyo cult itself.
Then again, it’s possible to see two...
That double reality has seldom been more dramatic than it is in Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto’s “Aum: The Cult at the End of the World.” An American-Japanese collaboration that refracts the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway through local and global lenses at the same time, this well-sourced look back at the conditions that allowed for such a terrible act of bio-terrorism is flattened into an infinite hall of mirrors that shines a brighter light on the film’s own sub-genre than it does on the legacy of the Aum Shinrikyo cult itself.
Then again, it’s possible to see two...
- 1/21/2023
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
It would be inappropriate to call cults “entertaining” — they’re soul-sucking, exploitative enterprises that ruin people’s lives — but if you’re interested in learning about human behavior, particularly its extremes, there’s no denying that cults are fascinating. Not just because people can do, say, and believe outlandish things as a result of cult mind control, but because of the social conditions that lead people to join them in the first place.
“Aum: The Cult at the End of the World,” directed by newcomers Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto, certainly doesn’t shy away from its subject’s atrocities; in fact, it opens with their most infamous one. But where less adept filmmakers might have resorted to shock value or bone-dry moralizing, the team behind “Aum” works hard to understand one cult in all its dazzling, horrifying complexity.
To reel you in, “Aum” opens with the cult’s notorious...
“Aum: The Cult at the End of the World,” directed by newcomers Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto, certainly doesn’t shy away from its subject’s atrocities; in fact, it opens with their most infamous one. But where less adept filmmakers might have resorted to shock value or bone-dry moralizing, the team behind “Aum” works hard to understand one cult in all its dazzling, horrifying complexity.
To reel you in, “Aum” opens with the cult’s notorious...
- 1/21/2023
- by Lena Wilson
- The Wrap
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