Japanese Reviews Reviews

Documentary Review: Trapped in Makyo (2022) by Tomojiro Amano 

"It's a Placebo effect rather than anything spiritual."

” doesn't waste any time in being forthright. Right from the get go, the documentary clears that it does not in any way, encourage the participation in, nor promote or provide any gray area about the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo. The cult was responsible for the terror attack which killed 14 and injured more than 6,000 people in Tokyo on March 20, 1995.

Trapped in Makyo is screening at the SF Indiefest

This drawing of the lines and simple assertion of stance is both informative and instructive, especially when the subject in itself, a cult, could pique and tease the public's curiosity. Filmmakers are only expected to trust the audience's own discernment, but in an era where crimes and their perpetrators have been been humanized in some documentaries and miniseries to the point where the victims' stories are dismissed and their loved ones are re-traumatized, this spelling out of intent becomes all the more timely and important.

The documentary is a composite of a fictionalized distillation of the experiences of members, and interviews with actual former members of the cult. The fictional part shows Hana, a 24-year-old bright-eyed, idealistic woman movingly portrayed by actress , who gets disillusioned by the deceptiveness and deviousness of the company she joins. When she tries to confront her superior for not being upfront about the nature of their job, she gets berated and humiliated. But this is just the start of her burden. It becomes unspeakably worse for her when her vulnerability is taken advantage of a male colleague who rapes her. She was in this state when she stumbles upon Nirvana, a group which promises to free her of the world's worries. She quits her job and invests all that she got to the group, whose founder spoke of salvation. 

Hana's experience in many ways is similar to what Makiko Munakta, a former member of Aum, has gone through. Makiko has left Aum after the Sarin attack in 1995, when the cult aimed to kill people by poisoning them with sarin gas. She has, however, joined Hikari no Wa, a splinter group formed by the former spokesman of Aum's founder, Shoko Asahara. Hikari No Wa broke away from Aleph, a group which came to be after Aum disbanded. 

The documentary gathers the perspective not only of Makiko, but also of Yoshiyuki Hirano, who's part of a group which hopes to prevent the recruitment of young people into cults, similar to what happened to Yoshihiro Inoue, one of Aum's leaders and primary architects of the mass murder. Inoue was only a young student when he got introduced to Aum. He would later join it and be ordained as a member after graduating from the university. Aside from the Sarin attack, he was linked to the killing of other people, with the said crimes also done in the name of the cult. He was executed in 2018. 

Aside from Makiko and Yoshiyuki, Amano also talks to a reporter who infiltrated Aleph and another member of Hikari No Wa, as well as the wife of another executed leader of Aum. Right from this array of interviewees, it would be easy to glean that the documentary did not talk to any of the families of the victims of the Sarin attack, nor those who survived it. But this is because the former members would show how they themselves became victims of the cult too and of Asahara's ambitions. This is where documentary succeeds as an introspective dissection of what makes cults a dangerous psychological trap.

It also makes a distinction between the groups which emerged after the dissolution of Aum and lays out nuances. Aleph and Hikari no Wa have been both under surveillance by the Japanese government, though Hikari no Wa claims that it aims to help the families of the victims of Aum. Suspicions linger that Aleph is very much just like Aum, however, which preys on people's anxieties and fragile relations with their families and the environment around them to lure them in. 

The documentary ends on a happy note, though, with Hana freeing herself from the cult. But here, Amano again doesn't hesitate in confronting his own narrative and says that this is not how it ended for Aum's former members, as many of them are still missing up to this day, their families still looking for them and waiting for their return. “Trapped in Makyo” also declares it empathizes with them, again showing an uncompromising clarity about its message. It's the kind of honesty and direct, conscious siding with the continuing quest for justice and acknowledgment of loss and pain that makes Amano's film incisive and relevant, a timely antithesis to the romantization of tragedy and torture porn which has seemingly became the norm for mainstream viewing now. 

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