the leader will see you now

Michael Gallagher's Heaven's Gate drama is the last thing I expected a cult movie to be: a riot.

By MIGUEL MATEO | JUNE 9, 2026

The Leader had no right to be this entertaining. A film about Heaven's Gate, the UFO cult whose thirty-nine members died in the largest mass suicide on American soil, should be a grim sit, and at its core it is. But Michael Gallagher makes a bold choice: he lets us laugh. Comedy and drama run side by side here, and it turns out that is exactly the right way to serve a story this dark. Because if you sit with it for a second, the very premise of a cult is absurd. The matching tracksuits, the Nike sneakers, the unshakable certainty that a spaceship is trailing a comet. We laugh at that kind of conviction because we recognize it. You do not have to look very far in American life right now to find people who have handed themselves over completely to a charismatic figure and a story that does not hold up, and part of what makes The Leader land is that it knows we know it.

Where the film holds back is on Do himself. Tim Blake Nelson plays Marshall Applewhite, and he is extraordinary, but the script never fully cracks him open. We get the broad strokes of his torment without ever quite living inside it. Bonnie Nettles fares better. We understand what pulled her toward the stars, what she was running from, and how she became the actual mind behind the movement, the leader behind The Leader. Vera Farmiga plays her with a stillness that is almost unnerving. She does not perform certainty so much as radiate it, and you understand instantly why people followed her anywhere.

It is worth saying plainly that Farmiga remains one of the most underused actors in Hollywood. Since her Oscar-nominated turn in Up in the Air she has quietly handed us one reliable, fully inhabited performance after another, and this ranks among her best. Nelson matches her beat for beat, and Jim Parsons, as a recovering addict who finds a family inside the group, gives a supporting performance that sneaks up on you with its tenderness.

At 104 minutes the film moves fast, maybe a touch too fast. I would have happily sat with these people longer and dug deeper into how the belief curdled. But that is a small complaint about a movie I did not expect to enjoy nearly as much as I did. The Leader is the shocking, unexpected crowd-pleaser of this year's Tribeca.

Rating: ★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Currently playing at Tribeca Film Festival