AUM: THE CULT AT THE END OF THE WORLD

AUM: The Cult at the End of the World, Greenwich Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 19, 2025

On March 20, 1995, members of a cult in Japan unleashed sarin on multiple trains in the busy Tokyo subway system. Thirteen people were killed during the attack, and more than a thousand were injured to various degrees of severity. That's where AUM: The Cult at the End of the World begins, but this documentary reaches slightly deeper than just detailing the terrorist attack and the decade-long history of criminal activity that led to it.

Directors Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto see this group, then called Aum Shinrikyo, as an early warning sign of how the media can be manipulated by charismatic and/or laughable figure, as well as how such a leader can move past some belief system among an insulated group and infect the whole of a society. We have seen it internationally in groups that warp a religion to violent ends, and on the political stage, many figures have taken advantage of both the mainstream media and social media to create a false impression of themselves, their beliefs, and what they would actually do if given power.

We can see a lot of that in footage of Aum Shinrikyo's leader Shoko Asahara, who started a yoga group in the early 1980s and, over the course of a little more than a decade, would transform that school into an organized religion, become a staple of Japanese television, and start a political party that ran for more than two dozen seats in the country's legislature. Some of Asahara's appeal was that he promised answers to all of the real or perceived problems of modern-day society. For those who didn't necessarily buy the philosophy he was selling, the self-proclaimed guru was at least good for some laughs. On TV, he seemed harmless enough.

That's one of the major reasons, several interview subjects in the film argue, that Asahara was able to carry on for as long as he did. Beyond the cameras in television studios and outside of the easy charm he conveyed on TV screens, Asahara and his cult were aggressively recruiting people, including children, and carrying out a systematic method of silencing anyone who criticized them. Even before the '95 attack made it impossible for people to ignore or deny what Aum Shinrikyo was planning and doing, those methods did include murder.

The filmmakers have put together a series of interviews and plenty of archival documentation to trace both Asahara and his cult from their meager beginnings to their terroristic ends. The subjects here include journalists who reported on the group and lawyers who knew that Aum Shinrikyo was a threat almost from its start. Many family members of cult members came to attorneys looking for help to rescue their loved ones, when it became clear that Asahara and the chief disciples among his hierarchy were preventing contact with the outside world.

Two of those family members, Hiroyuki and Eiko Nagaoka, are highlighted in the documentary. After their son became a follower of Asahar, the couple started an association with the purpose of seeking legal recourse and publicizing what Aum Shinrikyo was doing. While on camera, the father wears tubes in his nostrils for oxygen, but as we soon learn, it is not the result of age or some natural medical condition.

The narrative here unfolds with a sense of impending doom that extends beyond the act of mass violence the cult would perpetrate. The key interviewee is Andrew Marshall, a journalist who moved from London to Japan while Aum Shinrikyo was reaching the height of its popularity and power. He would go on to literally write the book (with David E. Kaplan) about the cult, upon which the film is based, and his insights are intriguing—as an outsider to the society, looking in and trying to piece together how the cult could act with apparent impunity for as long as they did.

The answers are fairly simple and quite unsettling. One of the remaining mysteries is why police services across Japan either did nothing about Aum Shinrikyo or seemed to intentionally botch investigations into the group whenever accusations were made against them. There's no clear answer as to some of the gaps in police work, such as how the search for the bodies of a family of three—including a baby—came up with nothing, despite there being a map to the exact location of the child's body. The map was accurate, by the way, which local police confirmed in the aftermath of the subway attack, so how did the search fail five years before that?

Part of the answer, at least, seems simple. Because Aum Shinrikyo was an official religion recognized by the government, police and other officials were hesitant to pursue multiple, credible leads—worrying they would appear to be engaging in religious persecution. Then, there's the fact that Asahara, whose sad past potentially reveals a motive to upend or destroy society from the very start, was famous, thanks to the fawning and cheerful appearances he made on television for years. Nobody wanted to believe that this smiling, happy man could be capable of the things of which he accused—if the media had actually covered those accusations in the first place.

AUM: The Cult at the End of the World is thorough account of the history of this group, which still operates under a different name and under new leadership (The new leader, by the way, is also interviewed here, and as everything comes together, his presence becomes increasingly disturbing). There's good reason to worry about what might come in the future, even as the world deals with people like these cult leaders in various facets of society.

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