Storyville: Leaving the Cult, BBC Four

Joe, Sam and Bruce may be three callow teenagers from southern Utah but they’re still smart enough to realise that the only world they have ever known is wrong, deeply wrong. So wrong, in fact, that they make the hardest decision of their lives by leaving their family, friends and community behind forever, as this is the only way to escape the madness.

It’s clear what kind of film Leaving the Cult (released in cinemas as Sons of Perdition) is going to be from the moment we hear the first notes of the ominous ambient soundtrack, and 17-year-old Sam tells us of his family’s attitude to his departure. “For them it would have been better for me to die than to leave,” he tells us matter of factly. Joe, also 17, is chillingly succinct in summing up what it’s like to have been in the crick (although his words could equally apply to being in the bosom of any religious extremist group.) “You’re not taught to think about this life, you’re taught to think about the next life.” Indeed. This of course gives licence to the male elders of the FLDS to make the lives of their women a living hell. Under the umbrella of love and responsibility to the community, they have as many as 50 wives which they essentially use as breeding machines, while earning new (often illegally young) wives, rather than gold stars, for good behaviour.

Because of the film’s admirable lack of sententiousness we are given some space to think for ourselves

But these three likeable young men now have a freedom of sorts, and we get to follow their lives for two-and-a-half years as they discover hair gel, beer, free-thinking girls, convoluted hand shakes and daft dances. Measom and Merton (tellingly ex-Mormons themselves) drop in occasional snippets of Jeffs’ taped voice (sounding like a woozier version of Stephen Hawking’s voice simulator) with bits of the Gospel according to Jeffs. At one point he intones, “Men have many wives, and that is the way men become like gods and their wives become heavenly mothers.” He might as well have meant that last part literally, as these poor women tend to be in an almost permanent state of pregnancy, bearing children until they can no longer do so.

Because of the film’s admirable lack of sententiousness we are given some space to think for ourselves on what we have witnessed. We can summon up our own feelings of outrage at the ruined lives of people who think they are doing the right thing, but have got it all so horribly wrong because their hearts and minds have twisted up by a bunch of warped, anachronistic and sadistic ideas delivered in the name of God. But really this film wasn’t just about one sick man’s hold over one small community, it was about the extreme followers of every deity-specific religion on the planet. Although that’s not to say the chillingly rational Richard Dawkins and his ilk are right either. My take on all this is by all means hypothesize or wishfully think that there may be more to life than this veil of tears, just don’t be fooled into thinking any dumb human has ever known, or ever will know, what shape the unknown and the unknowable takes.

Surely common sense and a little knowledge of biology and history should make us formulate the question; if our major religions are only, on average, a couple of thousand years old, and mankind is at least 200,000 years old, why weren’t we given our holy instruction manuals a lot sooner? But hey, now I’m the one preaching; it’s such an easy trap to fall into. But if nothing else this straight-forward question should lead you to suspect that God (take your pick on which one) is pretty perverse to let us carry on unguided, raping, pillaging and – in a state of ignorance we really can’t be blamed for – worshipping false idols. And yet the most blindingly obviously of false idols, such as the despicable Warren Jeffs, can still get thousands of individuals to do his every bidding. And not only that, but it’s the nature of faith that even now that he’s behind bars his flock are as loyal as ever, embracing his new role as martyr. What’s wrong with us human beings? And I do say us, rather than them, because the intelligence, sensitivity and good humour of these three kids shows that any of us could have had the misfortune to be born into the kind of purgatory on Earth that they were fated to.

But at least there’s a happy ending for these boys who, ironically, took a leap of faith to escape their polygamous faith. They manage to assist in the emancipation of other members of their family, and all end up going to college. But let’s leave the last word to the incarcerated Jeffs. At one point his creepy disembodied voice calmly informs us that all of today’s musicians and film-makers are, “the most filthy, immoral, adulterous people on the face of the Earth today". Has that kettle-insulting pot ever been blacker?

• Watch Sons of Perdition on iplayer

Watch an interview with directors Tyler Measom and Jennilyn Merton



Watch the trailer for Sons of Perdition