You could say I’ve been what most people would consider shockingly intimate with polygamists. I’ve visited the Hildale/Short Creek/Colorado City area where polygamist families suffered great losses during the recent floods, and I’ve played a part in helping kids escape from that bizarre lifestyle. So when I say that filmmaker Amy Berg’s latest documentary, Prophet’s Prey, is an extraordinary journey into the dark underbelly of polygamy as Warren Jeffs and his followers practice it, I’m not just blowing smoke up your pastel colored prairie skirt.

The doc is based on the book “Prophet’s Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints” by Sam Brower, with an introduction by Jon Krakauer, who is coincidentally getting a lot of attention these days for his portrayal in Everest. Berg weaves together interviews, actual footage, eerie quotes from the “prophet” Warren Jeffs himself, along with historical fact to present a story so strange and horrific that it’s hard to believe these things are actually happening in 21st Century America.

The despotic Jeffs, currently serving a life sentence in Texas for two felony counts of child assault, had been evading authorities and the Utah judicial system for years, while arranging plural marriages between young teenage girls and older men (himself included), breaking child labor laws in his community by insisting children leave school and work, separating mothers from their children if they weren’t obedient to his will, and removing members of the community who stood in his way. The documentary implies that Jeffs is still running the FLDS Church from his prison cell.

In my opinion, Jeffs is also responsible for the deaths of the three mothers and nine children who were recently swept away by the floods in Southern Utah. Jeffs has decreed that his followers avoid all forms of media: no TV, radio, internet, books, magazines, newspapers, etc. from the outside world. Had they been connected with news sources or emergency broadcasting systems, they might have known the waters were rising and been able to avoid the tragic deaths.

Amy Berg has turned the passion she put into other documentaries, including West of Memphis and Deliver Us From Evil, into pulling back the veil covering those rosy cheeked children and innocent looking women with their big hair and pioneer dresses. Once you see this documentary, you’ll be tempted to join her cause. It’s not an issue of people being allowed to marry whomever you want. It’s an issue of child and spousal abuse, sexual abuse, and perhaps even murder.

Unrated

1 Hour 30 Minutes

Get times and tickets at Fandango.com.

PROPHET’S PREY Review — Exposing Polygamy’s Dark Underbelly