HBO
authentic crime documentaries are all, to a degree, attempts at recreation, and Pray, Obey, Kill explicitly highlights that undertaking, no longer best through staged dramatic sequences but via habitual pictures of a miniature mannequin of the remote Swedish village of Knutby the place, on Jan. 10, 2004, Alexandra Fossmo turned into achieved in her mattress, and her neighbor Daniel Linde turned into also shot, albeit not fatally. via those instruments, in addition to recurring scenes of journalists Martin Johnson and Anton Berg poring over proof and conducting interviews, director Henrik Georgsson puts the reconstructionist nature of his complaints front and core with the intention to deliver the form of historical past-resurrecting work that goes into such investigations.
by the point his gripping five-episode docuseries is complete, youngsters, recreations aren't quite simply part of his formal method—they're a key to unravelling his tale's significant secret.
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Premiering on HBO on April 12, Pray, Obey, Kill is a narrative about a cult, and the appreciable and lethal damage it wrought. The Philadelphia congregation in Knutby turned into a Pentecostal sect that revolved around its leader, Åsa Waldau, who believed, and proclaimed, that she became the Bride of Christ, destined to be imminently betrothed to the son of God. even if she came up with that concept herself, or it turned into given to her via her correct-hand pastor Helge Fossmo, is a depend of dispute. Then again, so are lots of the things during this sordid saga. what's in reality regularly occurring is that, when Helge's spouse Alexandra (who was Åsa's sister) become slain in 2004, he become in an extra bed room. It's moreo ver clear that he was texting his family unit's impressionable and keen-to-please nanny, Sara Svensson, earlier than, after, and in-between the shootings. really, Helge continuously texted Sara, who lived in his condo with Alexandra, and with whom he'd been carrying on an affair for some time.
Helge changed into additionally sound asleep with each Daniel Linde's spouse Anette and with Åsa, so it's no surprise that he right away grew to be a chief suspect. As if his a lot of amorous connections weren't cause satisfactory to consider he'd performed a part in Alexandra's loss of life, his first wife, Heléne, had died under severely shady cases in 1999, within the identical condominium he later resided in with Alexandra. nonetheless, police soon came to consider that Helge hadn't been the triggerman; reasonably, he had satisfied Sara to commit the shootings. Sara herself confessed, claiming that she had been receiving nameless texts that implicitly and explicitly ordered her to perpetrate this double homicide, both because it would get her back in the first rate graces of Jesus (and Åsa, his future bride and earthly loudspeaker), and since it might permit Alexandra to acquire what they all wanted: a one-manner commute to Heaven.
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It's into this bonkers subculture that Pray, Obey, Kill wades. Director Georgsson pieces together a bounty of notable archival fabric, from footage of Helge's police interrogation and audio recordings of trial testimony, to texts, maps, diagrams, and home videos of existence in Knutby. moreover, he nabs new interviews with well-nigh everyone involved, together with a variety of contributors of the congregation. those guys and ladies element their worrying ordeals residing with—and blindly serving—Åsa, who became scarily jealous of any woman that might threaten her relationships with the guys she coveted, and who was a bodily and psychologically abusive wannabe-deity who created a way of life of worry, self-loathing and retribution so severe, she become eventually convicted in 2020 of assaulting her acolytes.
Helge and Sara were both found guilty in 2004—he got life in jail; she became placed in institutional care—and Pray, Obey, Kill's coup is convincing both to sit down down for chats about the infamous crime. principal to these conversations is a video that the police created at the time of the trial during which Sara retraces her steps on the fateful nighttime of Alexandra's demise. The 23-minute edited version of that recording became critical court docket evidence used towards Helge. Yet when Johnson and Berg get ahold of the six hours of unedited pictures, what they discover is a creation comparable to film shoot, comprehensive with rehearsals, numerous takes, staged photographs, efficiency suggestions, and individuals cajoling Sara into replicating her movements in a manner if you want to precisely parallel her already-given testimony.
Helge Fossmo in Pray, Obey, Kill
HBO
The nagging incongruity between forensic evaluation of how Alexandra changed into shot (at aspect-blank latitude) and Sara's account of the taking pictures (at a distance) is echoed by using the discrepancy between the cannily-edited edition of the reconstruction video shown in courtroom and the raw material obtained by Johnson and Berg. Pray, Obey, Kill for that reason turns into a multifaceted seem on the boundaries of recreations as a method to confirm purpose truth. Helge, Sara and Åsa had been all doubtless worried in Alexandra's murder in some fashion, however parsing the particulars of their knotted dynamic proves elaborate, if now not altogether unattainable. Sara may have acted alone, been duped through Helge into committing these crimes so he may be with a further lady (Anette or Åsa), or Sara might have with ease been an confederate, using Åsa to Helge's residence that evening so the Bride could do the dirty deed. No depend how many stacks of cellular phone fac ts Johnson and Berg comb through, or how pointedly they grill Helge and Sara on digicam, doubts abound.
That may render Pray, Obey, Kill an undertaking in frustration if not for the incontrovertible fact that, while plumbing this mystery, director Georgsson captures an intimate feel of Åsa's twisted indoctrination strategies, and of her minions' resultant, warped headspaces. In interviews with Knutby survivors Patrick Waldau (Åsa's ex-husband), his new spouse Maria Waldau, and Peter Gembäck and his ex-wife Emma, the sequence taps into the stew of faith-based mostly lies and delusions that granted Åsa such authority over her flock, and then ended in this mindless tragedy and, in the end, the cave in of the congregation itself. In that regard, it's much less a whodunit than an alternately frightening and depressing portrait of a cult that changed into predicated on terror, power, greed and sexual deviance, and inevitably ended the manner all cults do: in disastrous ignominy.
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