Prophet’s Prey (Showtime Anytime)

Sam Brower’s 2011 book Prophet’s Prey, which this new, like-named documentary by Amy Berg is credited as adapting, narrowly focuses on one investigator’s journey through the depths of a polygamist branch of the Church of Latter Day Saints. Brower takes the reader step-by-step into uncovering what cult leader Warren Jeffs has created and the atrocities he has performed on his followers. Berg’s documentary enlarges that scope greatly, bringing in both Brower and author Jon Krakauer, the author of another book about FLDS, and worrying less about the investigators and more about what is happening behind these gated compounds to believers young and old. Prophet’s Prey paints a clear narrative of these horrors; to Berg’s credit, every dot is connected and the collection of characters obvious.

Berg gets the most mileage out of her sound design. She interweaves the film with audio recordings of Warren Jeffs, in a basso monotone that sounds like some sort of alien incantation, rambling on about the end of the world and the duties of his followers. Later, she plays a recording of Jeffs singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” that is simplistically beautiful and just off-key enough to be distressing. Perhaps most chillingly, and most controversially, Berg chooses to play a clip of a much-talked about audio recording of Jeffs raping one of his pre-teen wives.

The film, though, is maddeningly conventional. Starting with the beginnings of the Mormon church, through the investigations of Krakauer and Brower, and into the arrests and trials of several key players, Berg and her team very rarely steer away from the “this happened and then this happened” structure of the film. This is disappointing, because it is the few times that Berg deviates from this that the film really reveals the most: an early, Brower-led trip through an abandoned FLDS school, and a later encounter between Brower and an FLDS security guard that ends with each of them taking pictures of the other taking pictures, create an atmosphere and get to the power these monsters hold more than any series of talking heads could ever do.

CLASSIC: Nanook of the North (Various Outlets)

Generally referred to as the first documentary feature, Nanook of the North remains, almost 100 years later, a beautiful portrait of a world far apart from our own. The film follows the everyday struggles and achievements of Nanook, an Inuk hunter in the northern reaches of Canada. We watch him hunt, keep warm, build an igloo and maneuver his threatening, ice-covered landscape. Flaherty, who had no real precedent to base his film on, lets all of these sequences play out in their natural fashion, in long takes interrupted by only the most basic of title cards. The film is almost a procedural, letting the effort and logic of seal hunting, igloo building, or ice chopping, develop on its own and not worrying about the drama behind the action. It helps that Nanook himself is as congenial as a documentarian could wish for, with a smile that stretches from cheek to cheek and a determination that radiates. He makes the film always warm and inviting.

A lot has been debated and written over the years as to how much of Nanook of the North was staged by Robert Flaherty, and how truthful it really is. In the end, though, that really doesn’t matter, nor does it take away from the power of Flaherty’s film. Nanook of the North isn’t a film that must capture every ounce of truth from its subject, nor is it a film that tries to lay out a message. It is merely a cinematic capturing of a people and a place. Whether Flaherty planned the seal hunt doesn’t make it any less powerful: it is there, in glistening black and white, for us to witness and make our own judgements on. The manipulation behind the camera doesn’t change what the camera captures, nor does it make the visceral experiences of Nanook any less enrapturing. Flaherty merely wants us to experience a different world, and Nanook of the North manages that beautifully.