The Monthly | Netflix
Maroesja Perizonius and Alice McShane’s 2024 documentary Children of the Cult acts as a brutal corrective to the award-winning Netflix nonfiction series Wild, Wild Country. Over six episodes, that 2018 series explored and exposed the controversial Rajneeshpuram community of Wasco County, Oregon, formed by Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (also known as Osho) in the early 1980s. And while it critiqued – with great fascination – the intricacies of the agricultural commune from wiretapping to free love and from a salmonella outbreak to Osho’s drug use and extreme egotism, the series shied away from giving voice to the children who grew up amid the orange-clad followers, and who had been sexually assaulted.