Why The Vow will mess with your mind

This freaky cult documentary about NXIVM is a wild ride...

Hello! I hope you’re well. If you’re after some comic relief or light entertainment in the evening following a tough day at work, The Vow is not it. It’s definitely not it. I thought I’d better warn those planning on watching it, because this cult doco is triggering …

After bingeing all nine episodes of The Vow, a deep dive documentary about Keith Raniere’s sick cult NXIVM and the twisted mind control techniques he used to manipulate participants, I found a tweet that really connected with me.

I felt it hard.

Jessica Suarez @JessicaSuarez

What if watching all 9(!) episodes of The Vow -- a show that could have been a tight 1.5 hour documentary -- is the real cult?

Yes, The Vow is long. Every episode is nearly a full hour. If you’re going to watch the whole thing, and you should, because it’s absolutely fascinating, then that’s nine hours of content. That’s the equivalent of one full Star Wars trilogy. That’s an entire lazy Sunday. That’s a lot of screen time.

And yes, there are plenty of other docos that explore extremely similar themes, like Wild, Wild Country, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and Holy Hell. All of them offer us extraordinary windows into lives that most of us will probably never lead. Probably.

But I felt that tweet because watching The Vow does make it feel like you’re with its participants, joining a cult right alongside them. It seems surprisingly easy. Often it’s just an invite from a friend for a friendly midnight volleyball game run by a dude in a bandanna with some crazy ideas about life. That’s all it takes.

That someone could be me. And that’s scary.

The Vow has incredible footage that takes you all the way back to the start of NXIVM. Raniere, a failed ‘90s pyramid schemer, hooked up with therapist Nancy Salzman in the 2000s and together they started marketing executive success programmes and self-improvement seminars. They charged a lot of money and started courting well known people. Several stars of Battlestar Galactica, a superior sci-fi show, signed up.

Thanks to Mark Vicente, a documentary filmmaker who escaped NXIVM with his wife - Star Wars star Bonnie Piesse - after 14 years, everything was caught on tape. Everything. He interviewed Raniere almost every day for years. He was his sidekick. He made entire full-length promotional movies for them.

And then he left. With all his footage. I love that.

You’ll see some wild stuff. You’ll see Raniere meeting and turning his other sidekick Alison Mack, from Smallville, for the very first time. You’ll see him with multiple women who all believe they’re in an exclusive relationship with him. You’ll see him twisting his words, manipulating those around him, gaslighting them so much they’re absolutely desperate to win his approval.

And you’ll see things play out when a secret sub-group of women called DOS break off and start doing terrible things, like branding themselves with Raniere’s initials. Yes, I warned you this was twisted.

But it wasn’t the outlandish sex cult branding stuff that got to me. It was all the footage from Raniere’s speeches, sermons and serenades. The Vow gives the man who calls himself “Vanguard” plenty of airtime, and that’s what really messed up my mind.

When Raniere talks, it’s mostly garbage. It’s incoherent babble. Kind of like Trump. He sounds like he means it though. It’s his intent. He hits hot button topics and uses big words and he feels sincere - even when it’s the most sexist garbage you’ve ever heard.

He makes one participant go on a 3am walk with him, just because. He makes her lick a puddle, just because. He tries to get her to run into a tree, just because. The whole time he’s babbling on about self-improvement. He’s a total and utter dickhead desperate for control.

Everything he says feels meaningful, but it’s just word soup. It’s verbal diarrhoea. I thought it was washing right over me. But it wasn’t. Every night I watched The Vow I would have the strangest, most messed-up dreams. They were sinister, full of paranoid delusions, of being trapped in situations I couldn’t get out of.

I can only imagine what those words were doing to people who heard them over and over again, every single day, for years on end.

If you’ve read the latest NXIVM news reports, you know how The Vow is going to end. Raniere’s due to be sentenced later this month on a raft of charges, including sex trafficking and conspiracy. So’s Mack. It will all be captured for a second season of The Vow. Yes, nine hours of The Vow apparently isn’t enough.

Raniere is trying to campaign for a retrial. He still thinks he’s innocent, and so do 50 loyal supporters who dance outside his jail in a show of defiance and loyalty and complete and utter stupidity. They’re suckers. Brainwashed. Completely under his spell. Delusional.

Or are they? Maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re completely and utterly happy with their choices, convinced they’re doing the right thing, and are taking the right path, because all they can see are the four walls that Raniere’s built up around them.

Whatever the case, one thing is for certain: if you invite me to a midnight volleyball game, I’m not going. There’s no way in hell.

• The Vow screens on Sky TV’s SoHo channel from 8.30pm, and is available for screening on Neon.