KARL Marx called religion the opium of the masses. Scientology is the creation of a science fiction author who saw creating a religion as an opportunity to get rich while controlling other people’s lives. Other authors who have trodden that path include Adolf Hitler.

In Australia, Scientology has been clever enough to gain legal status as a church. This documentary tells of the campaign by TV broadcaster Louis Theroux to expose the true nature of a church that ranks high in anybody’s list of history’s worst, toughest, less-congenial, most avaricious quasi-religious despoilers of human innocence.

Theroux found Mark Rathbun, a former senior Scientology functionary willing to talk. Taking a different approach to documentary technique, the pair joined director John Dower in “negative access”, which illustrates an unco-operative subject by provoking it to react.

In mini-screenplays written by Rathbun, actors play abysmal events in the Scientology story, involving current leader David Miscavige and actor Tom Cruise. But the sequences showing confrontations by opposing camera teams provoke more sardonic audience laughter than you might expect from an exposé of such a dreadful exercise in manipulating people unable or unwilling to understand its malign principles.

Some years ago a lady of high repute in Canberra’s cultural milieu tried to interest me in a sect called Dianetics, Scientology in a different T-shirt. I’m glad I didn’t accept her well-intended importunations. This film confirms my decision.

At Dendy