Escaping Utopia (BBC2)
Liz Gregory likes to call herself ‘the Devil’.
A committed Christian, she has devoted her life to helping refugees from a cult, whose leaders regard her as the embodiment of Satan.
With an infectious laugh, Liz holds up her fingers to her forehead and mimes horns. ‘That’s the joke,’ she grins.
I was instantly captivated by the initial episode of the three-part series Escaping Utopia, which made it clear to me that Liz is not being portrayed as Lucifer. The individual representing evil in this context goes by the more innocuous moniker of Hopeful Christian, despite being born as Neville Cooper.
The documentary Escaping Utopia employs a combination of investigative journalism, archival footage, and dramatic reenactments to narrate the tale of the Gloriavale community situated in New Zealand.
This commune, located on the South Island and comprising around 600 inhabitants, was established by Cooper in the early 1970s as a socialist Baptist cult where communal ownership of property is practiced. Within Gloriavale, adherents are urged to wed during their teenage years, and due to the prohibition of contraception, it is not uncommon for couples to have 10 or more offspring. These children are raised within the commune and are taught to never challenge its doctrines or its leaders.
‘Thinking is not encouraged in Gloriavale,’ said Pilgrim Christian, one of the founder’s 16 children. Pilgrim was banished from the commune eight years ago after clashing with the ‘shepherds’ or cult leaders. ‘They put me out as a heretic,’ he says.
His wife stayed behind, to remain with their 11 children. They now live in two rooms at the top of a barn-like building. The camera followed Pilgrim as he slipped back on to the site in the dead of night, to leave notes for his children and information about how to escape.
Through a mixture of investigative journalism, archive footage and dramatic reconstruction, Escaping Utopia tells the story of the Gloriavale commune in New Zealand (pictured)
A remote community (pictured) of about 600 people on the South Island, it was set up by Neville Cooper in the early 1970s as a socialist, baptist cult where all property is shared
Acolytes (pictured) are encouraged to marry in their teens and, with contraception forbidden, it’s not unusual for couples to have 10 or more children — who grow up in the commune, taught never to question its beliefs or its elders
The full, atrocious reality of Gloriavale is revealed slowly, with a cliffhanger at the end of each episode. As in true-crime serials such as Making A Murderer, the shocks are carefully timed, so that whenever we think life in the cult couldn’t get any worse, it does.
With grim predictability, it turns out that Cooper, who died aged 92 in 2018, was a predatory abuser — a voyeur who encouraged young couples to have sex while he watched.
One of the young fathers who still lives in Gloriavale, Boaz Benjamin, bravely agreed to talk to the film-makers. He was abused as a child, he says, and fears for the safety of his three children.
But despite the support offered by Liz Gregory and her team, leaving the cult is fraught with obstacles, many of them psychological. Since infancy, children are taught that disobeying Gloriavale’s ‘shepherds’ means eternal damnation and literal hellfire.
Some scenes, showing women sleeping in dormitories and rising before dawn to work in the kitchens, were staged. It wasn’t clear whether the figures in headscarves and peasant dresses were actors or former cult members.
The film-makers also became too easily engrossed in creating arty images of the women in costumes like extras from The Handmaid’s Tale. But in Gloriavale, fact is even creepier than fiction.
