In short: The Otherworld (2013)

Original title: L’autre monde

As regulars among my imaginary readers will probably know, I tend towards a pretty mechanistic and materialistic view of the universe, so I’m about as far from being a “believer” as you can get. I do try to treat people looking at the word with different eyes than I do respectfully and loathe the aggressive fanaticism of people like Dawkins-style New Atheists, who are just as irrationally convinced of their world view as the most extreme religious fanatic or UFO believer, and pretty damn rude about it, too. One needs to keep in mind that it may be oneself and not the others who are wrong about everything. Plus, even when one doesn’t believe in something, it is usually enlightening, fascinating or sometimes just entertaining to learn what others think about it.

However, I generally do find my patience tested by a lot of paranormal/esoteric/etc documentaries who often argue their cases in ways that make it very hard for me to give them the benefit of the doubt or my eyes and ears.

So I went into Richard Stanley’s documentary about every esoterically minded person’s favourite part of France, Occitania around Rennes-le-Château, Montségur and the other core places of the Cathar faith, his own spiritual encounter there and the various wild and woolly theories and stories about what’s going on around there with a bit of care. Once people start talking about spiritual vibrations and telluric energies, as they do rather a lot in here, my eyebrows can’t help but rise. However, the longer the film went on, the more interested I found myself, and realized that Stanley isn’t in the business of convincing anyone of his beliefs (or even making terribly clear what those beliefs actually are) but trying to portray a place that clearly has something beyond its history drawing the stranger – or more original – parts of humanity there.

While he clearly has his own ideas about the place, Stanley doesn’t attempt to turn a whole lot of sometimes very different experiences into a coherent tale, nor – thankfully – into a conspiracy theory, but is satisfied with letting his subjects and himself share their tales. He enhances those tales through some cheap yet effective psychedelic – and often just loveably playful (watch out for the running gag about cats!) – effects, nature shots that can’t help but impress at least some of the place’s draw on a viewer, and the kind of intelligent editing hand you usually don’t get in documentaries about esoterica.

Which, really, is rather a lot for any documentary to achieve.