UNITED STATES
The New York Times
By MANOHLA DARGIS
SEPT. 17, 2015
The chief attraction of Colorado City, or so it would seem from the brief entry on the website of the Arizona Office of Tourism, isn’t Colorado City but the “nearby scenic attractions” that include the Vermilion and Shinarump Cliffs. Set at the base of ravishing red cliff mountains, the city and its twin, Hildale, Utah, look straight out of Canaan. To watch “Prophet’s Prey,” Amy Berg’s tough and disturbing documentary about a secretive, polygamous Mormon fundamentalist sect with unsettling roots in the region, is to grasp, perhaps, the unspoken reason the Arizona tourism office seems to be suggesting that visitors drive right on by.
The writer Jon Krakauer didn’t get the message. As he explains in “Prophet’s Prey,” his interest in these particular fundamentalists was sparked when, in 1999, he stopped at a gas station close to Colorado City and Hildale. There, he saw a group of women dressed in the sort of long prairie dresses that Laura Ingalls Wilder might have worn if she had liked frocks stitched out of pastel polyester. This curious sight led him on a journalistic investigation into Mormonism and its extremes, including the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (F.L.D.S.), a breakaway sect with thousands of polygamous true believers in the United States, Canada and Mexico. His book, “Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith,” hit in 2003, but Mr. Krakauer, a guiding voice in the documentary, is still on the case.
“Prophet’s Prey” was written and directed by Ms. Berg, whose earlier documentaries include “Deliver Us From Evil,” a contemporary horror story about Oliver O’Grady, a Roman Catholic priest and admitted pedophile who evaded punishment as he was moved from parish to parish for decades. He was finally defrocked and deported to Ireland, after doing time in prison.
In “Prophet’s Prey,” Ms. Berg has found an eerie counterpart to Mr. O’Grady in the person of Warren Jeffs, a Mormon fundamentalist serving a life sentence for the sexual assault of two followers, including a 12-year-old girl and a 15-year-old he impregnated. By the time he was on trial, Mr. Jeffs was thought to have 78 wives, including 12 who were 15 or younger when they wed.
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