Captive Minds: Hypnosis and Beyond
1983 · 55m · Canada
Directed by Pierre Lasry
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Ashrams, military training and cults reveal shared methods of suggestion and indoctrination that can shape behaviour for life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Lasry's essay film plays it frustratingly straight—a well-reasoned comparative study that everyone agrees on feels almost like a betrayal of the provocative premise lurking underneath, and I'd rather see him interrogate the viewer's own suggestibility than just catalog it.
A formally rigorous essay film that inherits the structural DNA of 1970s structural documentary while carving its own path; Lasry's cross-cultural montage of ashrams, military bases, and cults demands the kind of sustained formal attention that separates genuine inquiry from mere argument.
The film's singular lever is the choice to let silence and repetition do the ideological work—Lasry cuts between these disparate spaces without narration to anchor meaning, trusting the viewer to feel the uncanny parallels, and that structural restraint on a 1983 budget is what makes the argument *stick*.