Australian cinema keeps building cults because the country keeps producing them

I want to say that Australia has a cult problem, but that is not exactly right. What Australia has is a landscape problem, and the cults are a consequence. The country is vast and quiet and indifferent. It does not care about you. And in that indifference, in the space between small towns and the bureaucracies that are supposed to govern them, people who claim to have answers can build entire worlds.

Australian cinema keeps returning to this subject because the subject keeps being available. The cults are not historical curiosities. They are ongoing conditions. The Family, the group led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne in the Dandenong Ranges from the 1960s through the 1980s, operated in plain sight for decades. Children were taken, drugged, bleached, and raised in a compound while welfare agencies looked elsewhere. The sect had members in the police force, in hospitals, in the legal system. When the story finally surfaced, the institutional response was not outrage but embarrassment. The system had not merely failed to catch Hamilton-Byrne. Parts of the system had been inside the cult.

The Clearing (Disney+, 2023) takes The Family as its foundation and builds something that is less a true-crime retelling than a study of what it feels like to be inside a structure that has replaced the outside world entirely. The series, created by Matt Cameron and Elise McCredie, centres on a character inspired by Hamilton-Byrne, played by Miranda Otto with a control so total it barely registers as performance. What struck me about the show is that it does not ask how a cult forms. It asks why anyone would leave. The answer, it suggests, is that leaving requires you to believe that the outside world is real, and the work of a cult is to make you doubt exactly that.

The geography of belief

I think about Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) as the beginning of this thread, even though it is not literally about a cult. The film takes a group of schoolgirls and their teacher to a volcanic formation in central Victoria and then removes them from the story. They walk up the rock and do not come back. What Weir captured, and what Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel understood before him, is that the Australian landscape has a quality that makes disappearance feel natural. The rock does not swallow the girls. They simply stop being where they were.

The school itself, Appleyard College, functions as a kind of cult. Mrs Appleyard governs through ritual, uniform, and the suppression of individual feeling. The girls are dressed identically. Their days are structured to the minute. When three of them vanish, the school does not process the loss so much as try to contain the disruption. The institutional logic of Appleyard College is the institutional logic of any closed system: the group survives; individuals are expendable.

I do not think Weir set out to make a film about cults. But the architecture is there. A remote location. A charismatic authority. A community defined by its separation from the world outside. The Australian Gothic, as a mode, keeps producing these shapes because the country keeps providing the conditions.

Smoke and ash

Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke (1999) approaches the cult from the other end, from the perspective of the person who has been retrieved. Kate Winslet plays Ruth, a young Australian woman who joins a spiritual group in India and is brought home by her panicking family, who hire an American cult deprogrammer, played by Harvey Keitel. The film is not interested in the cult Ruth joined. We barely see it. What interests Campion is the deprogramming, and the uncomfortable question of whether the family that demands Ruth’s return is any less coercive than the group they are rescuing her from.

This is Campion at her most confrontational. The power dynamics between Ruth and the deprogrammer shift constantly, collapsing into a sexual relationship that makes everyone uncomfortable, including the audience. What Holy Smoke understands is that the desire for a cult and the desire to escape a cult come from the same place: the need to belong to something that makes sense. Ruth’s family is chaotic, loud, contradictory, and demanding. The cult offered simplicity. The deprogrammer offers another version of control. Nobody in the film is free, and Campion does not pretend that freedom is available.

Silence as structure

Richard Flanagan’s Sound of One Hand Clapping (1998), which Flanagan adapted from his own novel, is about Slovenian immigrants in post-war Tasmania and the violence that silence enables. It is not, strictly speaking, a cult film. But I include it here because the structures it describes, the closed community, the unquestioned patriarch, the complicity of institutions that refuse to look, are the structures of cult formation rendered in domestic scale.

The father in the film, Bojan, is a man whose trauma has made him monstrous, and the community around him has agreed, through silence, to let the monstrousness continue. The Tasmanian landscape, as Flanagan films it, is beautiful and imprisoning. The hydro towns where the immigrants work are isolated not just geographically but linguistically, culturally, emotionally. In that isolation, the family becomes a totalising institution. There is no outside to appeal to. The nearest authority is hours away, and even if you reached it, the authority would not understand your language.

Why they keep coming back

The recent wave of Australian cult narratives, The Clearing, Rosie Jones’s documentary The Family (2016), even the fictional cult at the centre of Glitch (ABC, 2015-2019), is not a trend so much as a recognition. Australian storytellers return to this subject because the conditions persist. Geographic isolation has not been solved by the internet; it has been complicated by it. Institutional oversight remains thin. The mythology of self-sufficiency that runs through Australian culture, the idea that you should be able to handle your own problems, that asking for help is weakness, creates a silence around abuse that cults exploit.

What these films and series share is a refusal to treat cults as aberrations. In The Clearing, the cult is not an alien intrusion into normal Australian life. It is an intensification of structures that already exist: the charismatic leader who demands loyalty, the community that closes ranks, the institution that would rather not know. The cult is the suburb with the volume turned up.

I keep watching these stories because I recognise something in them that is not about cults at all. It is about the loneliness of living in a country where the distances between people are not just physical but emotional, where the institutions that are supposed to hold communities together are underfunded, understaffed, and easily captured by anyone with enough conviction. The cult does not arrive from outside. It grows from what is already there, from the gap between what the country promises and what it provides.

And Australian cinema, to its credit, keeps looking at that gap. Not because the looking fixes anything, but because the alternative is the silence that lets the next one form.