Young Male Member of the Anne Hamilton Byrne Family

March 03, 2022 Post a Comment

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This was published 5 years ago

The Family reviewed: meandering retelling of a existent-life horror story

★★★
(M) 98 minutes

I have no clear memory of when I kickoff heard of the Australian religious cult The Family, just I would take been sometime enough to hear the news when the group'due south base in n-due east Victoria was raided in 1987. At the least, surely I caught sight of the images of the children who were rescued and taken into care: docile victims in matching smocks and bleached-blonde fringes, recalling the aliens in Hamlet of the Damned.

Anne Hamilton-Byrne with a young member of The Family. — Anne Hamilton-Byrne with a immature member of The Family.

For me today, these images accept the eerie aura of something familiar nevertheless inexplicable, linked with other true-life horrors I one-half-grasped as a child: thalidomide babies, or the Chelmsford deep sleep scandal.

The full story, or much of information technology, is told in this documentary past Rosie Jones, a striking-or-miss filmmaker with an instinct for compelling bailiwick affair (her final film, The Triangle Wars, too touched on the occult, via the bizarre tale of a supposed "white witch" hired every bit a consultant past Port Phillip Quango).

Jones has a lot of material to work with: videotaped police interviews, Idiot box reports from the menses, and present-day interviews with witnesses. In that location are snippets of propaganda footage shot by the cult, overhead shots of forests for pulpy temper, and dramatic re-enactments illustrating bizarre details, such as cult leader Anne Hamilton-Byrne's habit of putting a hex on her enemies by writing their names on slips of paper frozen into water ice cubes.

Equally in The Triangle Wars, the meandering narrative occasionally gets bogged down far from the main track. If there is any single centring perspective, it belongs to the down-to-earth Lex de Human being, a sometime police sergeant who spent five years in a taskforce investigating the case.

Rather than telling the story in linear way, Jones gives us the facts roughly in the society they were uncovered by de Man and his squad – an understandable choice, but one that leaves key details obscured until the last moment.

What is plain from early on is that the dozens of children illegally adopted into the Family were subjected to systematic abuse: starved, beaten, drugged, and encouraged to see themselves every bit a brood apart from the rest of the world. Some erstwhile victims are fidgety every bit they recount their stories to Jones' camera, others unsettlingly calm: either fashion, there is no disguising the pain that remains with them today.

While much of this mistreatment was carried out by "aunties" – cult members entrusted with the duties of childcare – the film insists that the ultimate responsibility lies with Hamilton-Byrne, a capricious tyrant who encouraged her followers to see her as a reincarnation of Jesus.

As a case history she is more than fascinating than the average malignant narcissist, in function because elements of her grapheme propose a frustrated artist. Every bit we are repeatedly told, she insisted that most of her "adopted" children have their pilus bleached to make them resemble brothers and sisters (a handful became redheads, for diverseness's sake).

Hair, information technology seems, was important for Hamilton-Byrne, as a key to the challenge of maintaining a pristine, idealised image: photos and clips evidence to the evolution of her own wait, from the ascetic simplicity she favoured equally a young woman to a fully fledged televangelist bouffant.

While nobody claims to sympathize what made Hamilton-Byrne tick, the moving picture at least supplies plenty detail to spark speculation. Her married man, the man of affairs Bill Byrne, remains a much more shadowy figure, as does Dr Raynor Johnson, the distinguished physicist who co-founded the cult.

Indeed, Jones' focus on the children of the Family leaves a good deal unaddressed. Information technology would exist interesting to know more about the cult's belief system, about its ties to the Melbourne establishment on the one hand and to Indian spiritual leaders on the other, and about the intellectual climate that gave the whole enterprise a temporary veneer of respectability.

In this light, ane of Jones' bigger coups is an unfettered interview with long-term cult member Michael Stevenson-Helmer, who accuses critics of playing the victim card – and who remains a devoted acolyte of Hamilton-Byrne, now in her mid-90s and suffering from dementia. Fifty-fifty today, it seems, the Family lives on, and possibly this film is not the last discussion on the affair. Just for anyone haunted by this story, it is certainly a must-meet.

The Family is screening at Movie house Nova.