everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Beautiful, moving film.

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

There is no words that can adequately define the impact that this movie will have, its the sort of movie that you watch once but will stick with you forever simply due to the fact that such a horror movie could not be imagined if it was not True !!.This is such a powerful yet darkly disturbing movie that my advice is don't watch it alone or if you are easily upset.Marvelous performances by Polly Walker as the emotionally invested social worker will have you Loving her, and Luc Picard as the what can only be described as a Perverted and deeply destructive Cult leader. Make this a very rarely seen master piece that deserves to be watched just to applaud the womens strength in facing there Demon.I hope you get as much from this film as i did, but i wont say enjoy it because you truly shouldn't enjoy this story.Roly

Luc Picard gives a convincing performance as a crazy leader of a small Canadian cult. Based on a true story a crazy cult leader who views himself as a messiah, and brain washes nine women into being his wives and slaves. A local children's aid worker takes on the cult leader to the save the children and women he is abusing.

Very well done for a Canadian film. The film captured the true reality of these children and women whom suffered greatly! Sort of disturbing to know that this is a true story. The only problem that I had with the movie was that I couldn;'t figure out what province they were in. *SPOILER* Roche and his family (if you can call it that) have french accents so there is an assumption this is where it is talking place. When the police show up to do their business they are in OPP cars yet when the movie is finished they literally blurt out that this happened in Nova Scotia.

Savage Messiah is a true story. The story of a Canadian social worker, once beaten by her husband, who discovers the women and children of a small commune are being abused by their leader. This leader, it turns out, calls himself Moses and has made the nine women living with him his concubines, mistreating them in the most violent ways.This story made quite a lot of noise when it came out during the late eighties, both in Ontario and Quebec, especially because of the cruelty of the acts involved and the outrageous control "Moses" (Roch Thériault) had on "his" people.While attempting to depict, sometimes with success, how it was like to live on the Church River commune, the movie mostly follows, in a very straightforward way, the social worker who discovers the truth and tries to make everything stop. Thus, it very soon starts to resemble these true stories often seen on tv on Friday night. Of course, the budget here is a little bigger, and the actors quite a bit more talented, but apart from that it just feels like a big made-for-tv movie, very easy to follow, with its few strong emotional moments along the way, but no real character development. And although the advertising prompted the viewer to "be the judge", the movie clearly adopts a subjective point of view. In the end, it's an interesting story, although violent, but a movie that, sadly or not, will not make history.