In 1997, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed the largest mass suicide on American soil. This is their story.

In the 1970s, Marshall Herff Applewhite (Tim Blake Nelson) and Bonnie Lu Nettles (Vera Farmiga) began telling people they were extraterrestrial beings sent to Earth to guide humanity to the next level of existence. Dozens believed them, abandoned their families, dropped out of society and waited to be evacuated from the planet.

This is the true and almost unbelievable story of Heaven’s Gate, one of the most notorious cults in American history, brought to vivid, harrowing life by two actors at the top of their game. Tim Blake Nelson (“O Brother, Where Art Thou?”) is fully committed as Applewhite, and Vera Farmiga (“The Conjuring”) does not pull a single punch as Nettles. Together, they make this wild story impossible to look away from, walking a razor’s edge between the farcical and the genuinely disturbing.

Stylish and entertaining enough to hold audiences through its darkest turns, the film raises real questions about psychology, charisma and the human need for belief. Above all, it is a gripping dramatisation of one of the strangest chapters in American religious history.