Savage Messiah (2002)
6/10
“Show, don’t tell” is one of the most important rules for good storytelling. Anyone who has read the true story of Roch Thériault—cult leader, convicted murderer, and one of Canada’s most infamous criminals—will know many of the gruesome details of the mental, physical, and sexual abuse Thériault inflicted, and the murders he committed. Savage Messiah, a Canadian film adopted from the non-fiction book of the same name by Paul Kaihla and Ross Laver, shows us a few of these incidents. But most of what we learn comes from court testimony by Thériault’s concubines and children from the commune. Perhaps the filmmakers didn’t want to be exploitative. If so, their decision robs the film of much of its impact, even as it remains an adequate dramatization of these events overall.
Savage Messiah tells the story of Thériault (Luc Picard) and his followers, who made up the doomsday cult known as the “Ant Hill Kids” based near Burnt River, Ont. Thériault, whose followers called him “Moses”, had multiple wives that he impregnated as a religious requirement. He fathered 26 children, and ruled the commune where they lived with an iron fist. The film is told largely from the perspective of Paula Jackson (Polly Walker), a social worker at the Children’s Aid Society who first suspected Thériault of abusing women and children at the commune. Jackson seeks to rescue Thériault’s followers, and in doing so face the ire of the cult leader himself.
All I know about the facts concerning Thériault and the Ant Hill Kids is what Emily G. Thompson describes in her book Cults Uncovered, which doesn’t mention Jackson at all. If nothing else, this movie made me want to read Kaihla and Laver’s account. I can’t speak to how much this movie’s portrayal of Jackson is based on fact. All I can say is that in this film, she is portrayed as having escaped a physically abusive relationship, which provides dramatic back story and the framing by which we come to understand Thériault’s relationship with his wives.
Like Thériault to his concubines, Jackson’s ex-husband beat her frequently and severely, often under the influence of alcohol. Jackson’s understanding of what the women are going through, and her own escape, provide added psychological motivation for her wanting to help them. At one point she goes to the commune while Thériault is away, tries to convince the women to leave, and makes a big speech about how she knows what it’s like to convince yourself that you love a man who makes you feel loved and understood; who beats you severely, then weeps and says he’s sorry to the point where you love him even more. The speech is a bit melodramatic, but Walker delivers it well. Her best moment, though, is when Thériault returns, gets in her face, and threatens her. She looks him square in the eye and dares him to kill her. It’s a tense scene well played by both actors.
Picard is very good as Thériault. When you look at this hippie-looking weirdo with an unkempt beard and receding hairline, you wonder how he managed to convince all these women to put themselves under his complete control; to inspire unswerving loyalty even when he assaults them and does unspeakable things to them and their children. But the key is a scene where Thériault shows up at a bar where Jackson and members of her curling team are enjoying some beers together. Picard can turn the charm on and off like a faucet. When a waitress complains about her back, he offers to heal her pain if she’ll just give him a couple minutes. He massages her back, stares into her eyes, and tells her to give him his pain. When he’s finished, she beams, tells him the pain is gone, and that all his drinks for the rest of the night will be on her. Thériault’s charisma in this scene helps us understand not only how ordinary people can join cults, but how they can end up in abusive relationships with individuals who hide a rotten interior with superficial allure.
My main complaint about this film is that it doesn’t fully convey the insanity and horror of what Thériault did to his followers. That might seem hard to believe given what’s described, and occasionally shown. But the real Thériault inflicted injuries far more gruesome than what is displayed here. We see Lise (Isabelle Blais), a character based on real-life survivor Gabrielle Lavallée, escape with one arm missing after Thériault hacked it off with a meat cleaver. We don’t see eight of her teeth ripped from her jaw with a pair of pliers, which is also what Thériault did to Lavallée. We hear about an infant who died after being left outside in the cold. But we don’t see the two-year-old boy Thériault performed botched genital “surgery” on, who was then beaten to death by one of the cult leader’s followers. We don’t see Thériault convincing his followers to prove their loyalty to him by breaking their own legs with sledgehammers, as described in Thompson’s book.
All this is to say that the film barely scratches the surface of the horrors Thériault was responsible for. To depict these acts would have been extremely graphic, of course. But I also think it would have packed more of a punch than what we got in this film. True, it’s possible to adequately convey horror without graphic imagery. The Exorcist III offers a master class in horrifying the viewer simply by how the characters describe a killer’s acts of mutilation and murder. But Savage Messiah isn’t able to achieve that—perhaps because it’s trying to be more of a drama than a psychological horror film. Director Mario Azzopardi works in images like Thériault adopting the post of a crucified Christ when (spoiler alert) he is eventually arrested, though I doubt that happened in real life. Still, Savage Messiah could have used a bit more such artful horror, and less courtroom drama.
In any case, the film is worth watching due to the performances of Walker and Picard, and for shedding light on the motivations that drive people to stay in oppressive situations, whether that’s a cult or an abusive relationship. Appearing before a court prior to his sentencing, Thériault expresses sorrow and remorse for what he’s done and accepts full responsibility. The judge sentences him to life in prison without possibility of parole for 10 years. Thériault looks stunned. In the last scene, he stares out the window of a moving car at Jackson, wagging his tongue in the same lewd gesture he made earlier in the film. We understand that his dramatic courtroom speech was just another act: the mere portrayal of remorse by a sociopath accustomed to manipulating people for his own selfish ends.
A title card informs us that Thériault remained in prison as of 2002, and fathered more children during his incarceration with women who saw him on conjugal visits. The passage of time has made that title card a bit out of date. In 2011, Matthew Gerrard MacDonald, Thériault’s cellmate at Dorchester Penitentiary and a convicted murderer from Port au Port, Nfld. serving a life sentence, killed the cult leader by stabbing in the neck with a shiv. The Montreal Gazette reported that MacDonald subsequently walked to the guards’ station, handed them the weapon, and said, “That piece of shit is down on the range. Here’s the knife, I’ve sliced him up.” Indeed.