![]() ![]() ![]() Maybe it’s a cliché, but it seemed the spell she put on me was of another world, where art inspires love, decadence, pain, heartbreak and magic. Over the years, I romanticized her name and sought out her music whenever I went through a deep, tragic experience. But that was barely scratching the surface of what I would grow to love in Simone’s catalogue of transcendent music. As I heard Simone’s version of this song, I was seduced by her pain and struggle, all evident in her voice and the cadence of her piano playing. It was a cover of the Bee Gees’ song “To Love Somebody.” Before that, I’d heard the version by Janis Joplin, who covered the song not because the Bee Gees wrote it, but because Nina Simone sang it with such grace and beauty. When I first heard Nina Simone as a teenager, I didn’t know it. 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.Inside I’m screaming, “Someone help me,” but the sound isn’t audible – like screaming without a voice. 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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