Heaven’s Gate Horror ‘The Leader’ Never Feels Satisfying, But Maybe That’s the Point [Tribeca Review]
For the past several decades, cults have continued to fascinate us. Most of the cult media tends to be true crime programming, touching on the psychosexual abuse, hard physical labor, and white-collar crime that seem to always be a throughline with these collectives. The documentarians profiling them will put anything and anyone: The Christian influencers holding up megachurches, the hot yoga community, Black vegans, anti-vax homesteaders, and so on.
But cults don’t get the feature film treatment as often. The Leader shows the genesis of the cult of Heaven’s Gate through the lens of an intense but platonic love story between Bonnie Lu Nettles (Vera Farmiga of The Conjuring) and Marshall “Herff” Applewhite (Tim Blake Nelson). The film feels like a taxi ride from hell — with abrupt twists and turns in tone, cinematography, and in whether the absurdism is played for laughs.
At times, this melange of elements feels disjointed, but maybe that’s the point. I can’t imagine that being involved with something as all-consuming as a cult feels good. Having watched dozens of cult documentaries, including retellings of the rise and fall of Mother God, NXIVM and the Church of Scientology, it’s easy for me to imagine how euphoric and disorienting it feels to have left everything behind to pursue an emerging religion.
Still, as someone whose wheelhouse is horror, I was left wanting more of the found-footage moments. The film’s framing is that Bonnie Lu is being interviewed by a smarmy journalist, and she is defensively recounting the birth of Heaven’s Gate in her own words. Seeing the close-ups of the cassette recorder echoed Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, but the voiceovers felt more like narrative architecture than a device for chilling effect.
I felt most creeped out during The Leader when there were snippets of culty B-roll or when we got to see the confessional interviews taped by Heaven’s Gate members to prepare for the ascension, a.k.a. mass suicide. If you’re looking for a V/H/S-style scare, The Leader will probably not be your cup of phenobarbital-laced apple sauce. But if you’re looking for a comedy that’s funny the way Yorgos Lanthimos is funny? Or if you’d like to see a movie about a messy gay man and his straight bestie taking their co-dependent relationship way too far? You’re going to enjoy this Michael Gallagher movie, genuinely.
At the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival premiere, the cast and crew participated in a Q&A that shed some light on their intentions when putting the film together. An audience question about the risks of glorifying suicide led Gallagher to say that he wanted to be truthful and respectful in making the film, and that he didn’t want to make The Leader a horror movie. “We wanted it to feel real. To me, it’s a real-life horror film. It’s a real-life tragedy,” Gallagher said of Heaven’s Gate. “And I wanted to give it the respect and the moment that I think it deserves.”
There are, however, little sparkles of body horror throughout. The movie starts with Herff’s stomach being pumped, and Gallagher doesn’t skimp on the sound of the wheezing or the sight of golden bile pooling in a hospital pan. There isn’t much gore to sink your teeth into if you love extreme horror, but the castration scene, a punishment for a lapse in celibacy, had men in the audience visibly shifting and grasping their chins in horror.
Another obvious highlight is how Farmiga is in top form as Bonnie Lu. The way she looks into the eyes of the cult’s students is endlessly unnerving — not like a predator sizing up prey, but the way your local priest looks at you to parse out your sins. It almost makes you wonder if there was something real about the cult leader’s divine intuition.
At the premiere Q&A, Farmiga revealed that she had watched Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults, which came out in 2020, and that she had become obsessed with the real Bonnie Lu Nettles. Farmiga recalled practicing the way Nettles spoke and, specifically, how Nettles looked at people, for fun during lockdown. And that’s when it truly clicked for me. The Leader excavates the loneliness that makes you join a cult and how that one moment of feeling seen can make you feel alive again — no matter the cost in the end.
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The Leader
Summary
Horror lovers will wish it had more found footage and more at-home castrations, but if you love a Yorgos Lanthimos comedy, The Leader will be your jam.
Categorized:Festival Coverage Reviews