Maclain Way

Somewhere in the first hour of Wild Wild Country (2018), Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is driven slowly down a dirt road in a Rolls-Royce while his followers throw flowers. Nobody on screen tells us what to make of it. The commune shot the footage itself, decades ago, and Maclain Way and his brother Chapman let it play, then cut to somebody who was there, sitting in a plain room, telling us what it was like. That is the method. Find people who filmed themselves constantly, get hold of the tapes, and let the tapes and the survivors argue it out.

The brothers began with The Battered Bastards of Baseball (2014) and have moved between sport and crime since: Untold (2021), the sports series they co-created and directed several entries of, then The Kings of Tupelo: A Southern Crime Saga (2024), three parts on a ricin letters case involving an Elvis impersonator, and America's Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys (2025). They have said their conversations in the edit room are "so much more structured around three-act narrative and inciting incidences and music cues and pivoting the perspective", and you can see it. Their films have twists.

Wild Wild Country is where the method meets a subject big enough for it. Neil Meiklejohn cuts the archive against the interviews so that a story someone is telling is often on screen as they tell it. Adam Stone shoots the talkers in plain rooms with soft light from one side and lets them go on for a long time, and the longest talker is Ma Anand Sheela, Rajneesh's secretary and, since he was not speaking, his voice. We were appalled by her inside ten minutes and could not look away, and what did it was an old television interview in which she is asked about the townspeople and answers with a smile so wide it reads as contempt. The series gives her the best lines and the last word in most episodes, and it is honest enough to let you notice you are enjoying her.

It is also an hour too long, and it never decides what to think about Rajneesh himself, who sits in the middle of six hours saying almost nothing. Brocker Way, the third brother, scores the series so that the music takes the side of whoever is speaking, and when the speaker is Sheela the music is warmer than the pictures have earned. Handing the audience the job of deciding is a fair aim. It is less fair when the score has already voted.

Three acts and a twist suit a season of sport, which comes with a final built in. A cult has no final, only a man who would not talk, and the brothers, having declined to judge him, ended up with six hours in which the most important person is the one we learn least about. Start with Wild Wild Country all the same. Both sides sound reasonable in turn, and the horror comes from watching reasonable people do what they did.