Louis Theroux wrote and stars in My Scientology MovieBBC Films/ Magnolia Pictures/ Madman/ Altitude

My Scientology Movie is Louis’s most disturbing documentary yet. For the first time, he is entirely impotent against the sect of society which he investigates. He is more probing and undaunted than ever, and yet the Church which he tries so relentlessly to infiltrate remains utterly impenetrable. It is the Church’s flat refusal to cooperate which makes the documentary so unusual, since it is unprecedented that Louis has been entirely unable to get close to the people whom he investigates.

But Louis is inexorable in his efforts: since he cannot actually penetrate their community, he turns to ex-members of the Church to provide him with the inside information he needs. The discoveries made about the inner workings of the cult are unnerving – and more so as it becomes increasingly apparent that the man feeding Louis with this information was, for a long time, a key figure in its midst. A strange dynamic arises between Louis and this man, Marty Rathbun: his cooperation is indispensable to Louis, being his central source of information, but his patience begins to wane as Louis probes deeper into his past. We begin to see a side to him that is not far from his own unsettling descriptions of Scientologists – a thought that is unsurprising when we consider that he was a high-brow member of it for 28 years.

The documentary focuses less on the belief system of the religion than the effects it has on its own community, which lends an even greater sense of enigma to a world which we know incredibly little about. Shut out from its sphere, the angle from which we view the Church becomes progressively more sinister. Louis’s attempts to get physically close to the Church’s headquarters, Gold Base, results in him being threatened; doors being slammed in his face; police called for his removal, and cameras filming his every move. Luckily, Louis sees the funny side to all this – he is bemused rather than shaken by their strange methods to shut him out, retaliating against the church’s authorities with the insolence of an unruly child. He has nothing to hide: he is more than willing to share his own intentions with the members of the Sea Org (the most elite circle of scientologists), and this openness comes into direct contrast with their own disturbing and obsessive secrecy. As a result, the organisation is cast in an increasingly ridiculous light. When they demand Theroux stop filming them, for instance, he reasonably suggests that they should do the same, and what ensues is a ludicrous dispute in which both parties face each other with cameras, stubbornly instructing one another to put them down. It is a scene more suited to a playground than to the inner circles of a religious cult.

But there is a latent sense of threat and danger pervading the whole documentary, which the frequent moments of comedy serve to relieve rather than conceal. Perhaps the most disturbing rumour of the cult is that of the ‘Reign of Terror’, continued by current leader David Miscavige, who succeeded founder L. Ron Hubbard. Ex-members confirm its prevalence within the organisation, Marty himself having been a key implementer of it. The supposed violence at the heart of the Church is Louis’s central focus in the documentary, and since he cannot witness it for himself, he attempts to recreate it through the medium of actors. This lends the documentary a sense of meta-theatricality, where actors auditioning for the final scene of the documentary become a key part of the documentary itself. We witness auditions for David Miscavige and Tom Cruise, and the effects are unsettling. The actors become increasingly realistic, and the sense of the cult which Louis tries to evoke becomes more and more palpable as the documentary progresses.

Watching the documentary, it is difficult to believe that the whole religion is real: there is a sense that it would be more fitting if it, too, were played by actors.

Choosing to leave Scientology, said one of the ex-members, was like committing a suicide – but it had got to the point where this was still preferable to living within the cult. It seems inconceivable to many of us that we have the capacity to create and believe in such a world – yet the hundreds of thousands of people who belong to Scientology today are living testimony to the fragility and impressionability of mankind, which renders such worlds possible