![]() As he explains in “Prophet’s Prey,” his interest in these particular fundamentalists was sparked when, in 1999, he stopped at a gas station close to Colorado City and Hildale. ![]() The writer Jon Krakauer didn’t get the message. To watch “Prophet’s Prey,” Amy Berg’s tough and disturbing documentary about a secretive, polygamous Mormon fundamentalist sect with unsettling roots in the region, is to grasp, perhaps, the unspoken reason the Arizona tourism office seems to be suggesting that visitors drive right on by. Set at the base of ravishing red cliff mountains, the city and its twin, Hildale, Utah, look straight out of Canaan. And it benefits from the presence of one more droppable name, indie singer-songwriter Nick Cave, who shares credit for the ominous score with Warren Ellis and narrates ably but unobtrusively among the many talking heads.The chief attraction of Colorado City, or so it would seem from the brief entry on the website of the Arizona Office of Tourism, isn’t Colorado City but the “nearby scenic attractions” that include the Vermilion and Shinarump Cliffs. No, “Prophet’s Prey” isn’t definitive, but it is compelling and occasionally even cinematic. Compounding the danger is the dynastic instinct the result here is a microcosm of, say, North Korea. As the film makes clear, the anti-establishment rhetoric of isolationist cults forces their retreat from society, giving almost absolute power to the leader. It is not just another human anomaly, however. Others may not have been proven in a court of law, but the case that Berg lays out is overwhelming. Many of the worst details explain why the man is in prison. The story of how Jeffs squeezed his flock into submission, even devotion, is truly terrifying. The tone is soft-spoken to the point of being hypnotic, yet the content is fire and brimstone, a constant drumbeat of “Obey the prophet! Obey the prophet!”īerg paces the story like a horror film, and rightly so. The most chilling of all these voices is Jeffs’ own, preserved in tape-recorded sermons and prophesying. But it draws on enough inside voices - or, rather, previously inside voices, since cast aside by the prophet - to paint a chilling portrait of a megalomaniac. It only gives a cursory nod to all the meticulous work by law enforcement and prosecutors that led to his downfall. The narrative that Berg has assembled will not be the definitive story of Warren Jeffs. While Brower, too, gets his screen time, the film very much remains in the hands of its director, Amy Berg, who came to fame herself as the maker of “Deliver Us From Evil.” That 2006 documentary was about the American priest Oliver O’Grady, who admitted to sexually abusing two dozen children, but also about the cover-up by the Catholic hierarchy that protected him. While researching the FLDS, Krakauer forged an alliance with private investigator Sam Brower, who wrote about his seven years digging into the church in a 2011 e-book, also titled “Prophet’s Prey” (and with an intro from Krakauer - a nice marketing coup). ![]() Also, and not incidentally, this was before the younger Jeffs was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List and later convicted of child sexual assault. ![]()
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