AUM: The Cult at the End of the World (2025) The Danger of Laughing at Extremists

Debuting at Sundance earlier this year, Aum: The Cult at the End of the World brings renewed attention to Tokyo’s infamous 1995 sarin attack, balancing a wealth of archival footage from Aum’s rise with some occasionally more heavy-handed true crime notes. Based on an eponymous book by Western journalists, Andrew Marshall and David E. Kaplan, and directed by Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto, it shows its Japanese-American lineage in an over-reliance of talking head appearances by Marshall, but archival footage of Aum’s events and propaganda pieces (including anime) and the media appearances of Shoko Asahara, even as the cult’s criminal activities escalated and its secret weapons stockpile grew. Interviews with Japanese journalist Shoko Egawa, who long covered the cult, help supply an additional level of insight.

The treatment of Asahara as an entertainment figure, not to be taken seriously, brings Trump’s rise to mind, perhaps because he appears in a clip from the 1980’s fear-mongering over Japan’s ascendant economy (some fixations never change). Asahara appears in the light of comic relief for talk show hosts even as a Victims’ Association had been formed in 1988 to raise awareness of the isolation and financial exploitation of members, and the disappearance in 1989 of the attorney leading the charge, Tsutsumi Sagamoto, who vanished without a trace along with his entire family. Between the time of the Sagamoto murders and the sarin attacks, Aum would use its highly credentialed members and secret facilities to manufacture a whole range of weapons, both conventional, biological and chemical–albeit the filmmakers could have given us a few more details against the backdrop of Aum’s Russian expansion.

Most will know mainly of the sarin attacks from vague background noise or through Haruki Murakami’s Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, whose first-person interviews purposefully focused on the victims as a counter-weight to media sensationalization of the cult; other coverage tends to leave it at the subway attacks. If anything, Aum: The Cult at the End of the World skims over the events of March 20, 1995 only lightly. The film prefers to linger on the environment in which Asahara was able to establish his cult, not least of all police reluctance to be seen persecuting a religion after the pre-WWII crackdowns on non-Shinto sects were legislated against by the occupying Americans. This background keeps even a tip to authorities on the locale of the Sagamoto family remains from yielding fruit, though the serious pursuit of the information would have plausibly brought Aum down long before the sarin attacks.

The documentary does an excellent job at linking Aum’s ability to recruit to disenchantment with what was on offer by the bubble economy of the ’80s, which swept through the country in a wave of consumerism and materialism. Unfortunately it suffers from a lack of any interviews with former cult members apart from Fumihiro Juyo, the former spokesperson for Aum who is now the head of its successor organization Hikari no Wa. Juyo managed to avoid the death sentence received by Asahara and twelve other members involved in the Sakamoto murders, but has a strange air of detachment over the attacks (there were more attempted murders of journalists as investigations increased), which the interviews clearly never rattled; it’s nigh impossible to see the human underneath the frontispiece.

As a counterpoint to Juyo are the Nagaoka family, parents of a cult member who became a key part of the Victims’ Association. This hyper-vigilance is no surprise given their history–Nagaoka himself was attacked with poison gas as an enemy of Aum. Nevertheless the documentary fails to quite justify its ending notes of ominous threat over Hikari no Wa’s existence, even as it ignores a 2019 public attack made on New Years’ Day in explicit retaliation for the executions.

Rather than convincingly set the stage for future harm which it is implied may come from the remnants of Asahara’s, Braun and Yanagimoto end up convincing the viewer of the dangers of trivializing an extremist as a harmless court jester despite their underlying beliefs. It’s too bad they can’t reveal more of where the authorities themselves went wrong by speaking with those who looked the other way, or of the emotional pull for members themselves. But where the film doesn’t lean too hard on sensationalism, it does provide a broader context for the accelerating extremities of Aum, as its paranoia and alienation increased after its failed electoral ventures and its willingness to kill grew in tandem. Reporting on those developments is one thing, however–understanding them surpasses the task set here, which by necessity is always at a distance from the events within Aum’s compounds. It doesn’t keep the documentary from giving a useful overview of the group’s rise and ultimate fall, but it does prevent it from rising to the level of a classic.

Nora’s Archive – Aum: The Cult at The End of the world