The Leader

Michael Gallagher · 2026 · 104 minutes
Nov. 14 · Regal 1 · 4:00 p.m.

In 1997, thirty-nine members of the American cult known as “Heaven’s Gate” committed the largest mass suicide to ever take place on American soil. This is their story.

Programmer’s Note

Writer/director Michael Gallagher was eight years old in 1997 and living a few miles down the road when 39 members of Heaven’s Gate were found dead in a rented mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California. The adults in his life had a one-word explanation — “crazy” — and Saturday Night Live was soon mocking the dead. “The world wanted to move on,” Gallagher has said. “I just wanted to understand.” His film begins 25 years earlier in a Houston hospital, where Marshall “Herff” Applewhite (Tim Blake Nelson), a disgraced music teacher, is having his stomach pumped under the care of Bonnie Lu Nettles (Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air, The Conjuring), a nurse in a failing marriage with her eyes on the night sky. Soon they are Do and Ti, with a theology, a rulebook, and a growing flock of true believers.

Heaven’s Gate is, in a certain sense, ridiculous. It would be impossible to depict the bowl haircuts, shapeless uniforms, new names (Jim Parsons’s Warren is rechristened “Warody”), and matching sneakers without it looking ridiculous, and to his credit Gallagher doesn’t try. The Leader is often very funny. But it wouldn’t be accurate to call it a satire, and it certainly isn’t the kind of gawking, true-crime drama its subject invites. The followers, played by Parsons, Simon Rex (Red Rocket), and Grace Caroline Currey, are lonely people who have been offered a surrogate family and, better still, relief from the anxieties of having to make a decision ever again. We laugh at and ache for them, but we also never forget the date circled on the calendar. Gallagher performs a remarkable tonal balancing act: The Leader is unnerving, provocative, absurd, and terrifying, often all in a single scene.

Nelson is the fulcrum. “This movie is about belief,” he said at the Tribeca Film Festival, where The Leader premiered earlier this year, and so he portrays Applewhite as a man who believes every word he says. There’s no huckster’s wink, which makes him funnier, sadder, and far more frightening than he would be if he were reduced to a symbol or a straw man. In that first hospital scene, Herff asks his nurse if he is going to die. Bonnie lets the question hang. “Yes … some day.”

Tim Blake Nelson has been one of the indispensable faces of American movies for decades, with an acting resume that includes Delmar in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2000), the singing gunslinger of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), Looking Glass in HBO’s Watchmen, and more than a hundred other roles. More recently he has taken on the role of producer, putting his name and labor behind independent films made far from the coasts: Old Henry (Potsy Ponciroli, 2021), shot just outside Nashville, Asleep in My Palm (Henry Nelson, 2023), Bang Bang (Vincent Grashaw, 2024), The School Duel (Todd Wiseman Jr., 2025), and his own latest as writer/director, The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd (2026). The Leader, filmed in Louisville, Kentucky, joins the list.