Television series

The Vow

Name: The Vow
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2020

HBO's slow-burn true-crime documentary series about NXIVM, told largely through the people who were inside it — the actors, the true believers, the ones who filmed their own indoctrination without knowing it. It's patient, uncomfortable, and more interested in how someone gets pulled in than in shock value. For anyone who wants to understand coercion rather than gawk at it.

TVMaze rating

7.4

If you liked this

Wild Wild Country2018

The gold standard of cult docuseries — Netflix's account of Rajneeshpuram is stranger, funnier, and more morally slippery than you'd expect, with archive footage that feels almost too good to be true.

But Six hours is a big ask, and it occasionally lets its most magnetic subjects off the hook a little easily.

Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult2020

The direct rival account of the same story, centred on India Oxenberg, and genuinely worth watching alongside The Vow for how differently the same events can be framed.

But If you've just finished The Vow, some of this will feel like going over the same ground from a slightly different angle.

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief2015

Alex Gibney's HBO film on Scientology has the same interest in charisma, hierarchy, and why smart people stay — tighter and angrier than a series, with jaw-dropping ex-member testimony.

But Two hours means less room to sit with any one person's experience; it's more indictment than character study.

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Marjoe1972

Same question as The Vow — how charisma manufactures belief, and what it costs the person performing it — asked in 1972, before the genre had a name.

An Oscar-winning vérité documentary following a former child evangelist as he cynically works the revival circuit one last time, exposing the machinery of charisma and belief from the inside — decades before anyone called this genre 'true crime.'

But Grainy, dated, and slower than modern docs — it asks you to sit with unease rather than resolve it.

Holy Hell2016

Made by a former member using his own 20 years of insider footage of a Los Angeles cult, this has an intimacy The Vow can only gesture at — you're watching someone process his own manipulation in real time.

But The home-movie quality and one-man perspective make it feel small and strange rather than polished.

Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey2022

Netflix's account of the FLDS church under Warren Jeffs shares The Vow's interest in isolation and control, but pushes further into outright horror.

But Considerably darker and more distressing in its specifics — this one earns its warnings.

LuLaRich2021

An MLM documentary that's lighter on its feet but asks the same underlying question — how ordinary, hopeful people get talked into giving everything to a charismatic leader.

But Money, not sex or violence, is the currency here, so the stakes feel smaller even when the damage isn't.

Heaven's Gate: The Cult of Cults2020no page yet

A meticulous, patient rebuild of the 1997 mass suicide, using surviving members' own words to explain a belief system that still manages to surprise.

But Its restraint can tip into slowness, and it assumes some patience for theology-heavy detail.

Escaping Twin Flames2023no page yet

A more contemporary, internet-native cult story with the same architecture of charisma and control, useful for seeing how these dynamics have simply moved platforms.

But Thinner and shorter than The Vow, with less access to its central figures.

The Master2012

The same anatomy of a charismatic leader and a vulnerable follower, reimagined as fiction — freed from needing to explain itself, it goes further into the psychology than any documentary is allowed to.

Paul Thomas Anderson's fictional drama, with Philip Seymour Hoffman as a magnetic self-help guru and Joaquin Phoenix as the damaged man drawn into his orbit, gets at the psychology of devotion with a precision documentary can't quite reach.

But Deliberately opaque and unresolved — it's more interested in mood and performance than answers, and some find it frustratingly cold.

Waco2018

Swaps The Vow's patient insider testimony for a tense, plotted dramatization — same fascination with belief and control, but told as an action-thriller rather than a confession.

A dramatized miniseries about the Branch Davidian standoff, told with real tension and sympathy for people inside a besieged religious community, and a reminder that the government's response to a cult can be its own kind of story.

But As a scripted thriller it simplifies and compresses real events, and takes clear dramatic license with facts.