I have lived a version of what ten million people just watched as entertainment.
A friend rang me after finishing Unchosen on Netflix and asked what I thought. I got through the first three episodes the same night. Within minutes, the feel of the setting had produced something specific in me, it wasn’t nostalgia, it was dread. This feeling was a familiar unease I never chose.
Rather than doing a review, I want to provide an honest account of what the show gets right, what it does not show and what the question it opens leads to.
Before anything else: what is a cult?
The word comes from the Latin word Cultus meaning care, cultivation or worship. It evolved to describe an unusually intense, exclusive society with rigid belief and deliberate segregation from the outside world.
I was raised inside a high-control religious cult community from the age of four to eighteen. I know what Rosie’s world smells like. I know the grammar and the phrases used to create a language that becomes a quiet instrument of control. I know that unseen weight of a room where one person’s interpretation of God is the only permitted reality, where your spirituality is measured by your performance of belief. Just as Adam had to punish his brother in front of elders to prove he is worthy of moving up the ranks into leadership.
Although Rosie’s story is fiction, the mechanics on which it is built are not.
What the show gets right
When you are raised inside a belief system, it is not a cage you can see. Rather it is the air that you breathe. The grammar of every sentence you have ever heard spoken. The rules do not feel like control because they are not presented as rules. They present themselves as the way things are done. As the way things have always been.
As little Grace says: These rules keep me safe.
This is so very accurate. Most people outside these environments cannot fully grasp how complete that acceptance is. When Rosie watches her husband receive information about the outside world that she is not permitted to know, she does not experience it as injustice. She experiences it as the correct order of things. When she finds Grace drowning and all credit is given to Adam and his brother who arrived later, she does not register it as erasure. She registers herself as disobedient for acting at all.
The show captures this internal architecture without explaining it. That restraint is its greatest strength.
Where it misses
What ultimately prompts Rosie to recognise her situation is an outsider named Sam. He introduces a point of comparison she has never had. The show requires this external catalyst to move the story forward. That is a narrative choice, and it is also a cinematic limitation.
In reality, the recognition rarely arrives through contrast. It arrives through accumulation through a slow pressure of small inconsistencies. There is a feeling that something is wrong that a person cannot yet name and has no language to describe. The experience Rosies has with Sam functions dramatically, but it compresses and externalises what is, for most survivors an entirely internal and far slower process.
The more important question the show raises but does not answer is this: Rosie’s exit had its drama, but the exit is not the hard part.
What comes after the watching
When you leave a high-control environment, whether a religious community, a controlling family system, a workplace or a friendship circle, the pressing question you invariably want to ask for the first time is this:
Who am I when I am not who they needed me to be?
That question is not answered by leaving. It can only be asked once you have left. This is where the most important and difficult work begins.
If you watched Unchosen and felt something unsettling such as recognition, discomfort or a question you can’t quite finish, that feeling is information.
It is not a diagnosis. It is not evidence of trauma. It is the beginning of a question worth sitting with: Whose version of reality have I been living inside?
The mechanics of coercive control do not require a compound or a charismatic leader. They require an environment where one version of reality is presented as the only one, and where questioning it is made costly. The scale changes while the architecture does not.
Not all belief systems are harmful. Not all communities that ask for commitment are coercive. The difference between a belief you have chosen and a belief you have inherited without examination is worth understanding. That distinction is not always visible until something such as a conversation, a story, a show you didn’t expect to affect you creates enough distance to look back.
Although the episodes end. The question doesn’t have to.
I explore this in depth in Illusion of Belief, Book One of the Tully Quinn Series — available July 2026.