Not that I was fascinated by the story but presentation was really impressive. Original, unusual, captivating.

The picture itself appeares mesmerising and outstanding acting of Olivia Colman and David Thewlis makes it impossible to take one's eyes off screen. Initially I wanted to see David of course, but Olivia... damn she outshined everyone!

Back to David. His absolutely gorgeous voice and accent gets me every time! He reminded me of V.M. Varga now and then, I even had to google if he had that same tie from 2017 (he didn't) and suit (still not sure about that lol). But it wasn't just appearance that had me get Fargo flashbacks, but also the way his character carried himself during interrogations.

Anyway! Landscapers is a pure masterpiece, both in terms of directing and acting!

I really enjoyed this story was shown from the perspective of a relationship and felt heartbroken realizing they would hardly ever see each other again. This is the way love should be - quiet, homely, forgiving and self-sacrificing!

Chicago Tribune March 1979

By Michael Hirsley

One week, he was a Yale University graduate with a bachelor of arts degree in psychology and philosophy, considering graduate school and beginning summer vacation in Berkeley, Calif.

The next week, he was on a farm with his new friends, jumping and pumping his arms up and down while chanting, “Choo-choo-choo-choo,” like a “choo-choo” train in a sort of rural Romper Room gone wrong.

After four weeks, he called his parents to assure them he was doing well. Within six months, his new California friends had become his only family.

He turned over to them his earnings from selling flowers, then from washing dishes, while settling for peanut butter sandwiches as nourishment, and four hours for sleep. Once, he sneaked away and bought himself a glass of milk and a cookie. After he finished them, his shame was instant. He threw up.

Why would a 22-year-old man with a college education begin acting like a child, pliantly follow orders and work for next to nothing, and be unable to eat a cookie in solitude without feeling like a traitor?

He met them that first week in Berkeley. A man who had been kind enough to direct him to a hotel invited him to dinner. There, he met the group.

“They didn't say anything about being a religious group. They were friendly and paid incredible attention to everything I told them about myself,” Edwards says. ‘‘I liked the atmosphere better than social hours in college.”

But still, it is disquieting to imagine that someone like Christopher Edwards — who still fits the Ivy League image in a vested suit, and still looks like a college student as he sips a cup of coffee in a Chicago hotel room — “gave” his soul temporarily to a cult.

His credentials are non-radical, middle-of-the-road: Son of a doctor, member of an upper middle class family, spent summers traveling in this country and in Europe... Was he really the typical college graduate he seemed to be when he became a Moonie?

“What’s typical?” he asks. “One of the last memories I have of college is sitting with a friend and watching (on television) the last troops leave Vietnam. I was somewhat disillusioned with the war and our society.”

He said his peers in the Moonies included many white, middle-class, college-educated men and women in their early 20s.

“There are people who are more susceptible to a religious group like this, people coming out of college, a little disillusioned, looking for a loving community,” he says. “But I really fight the notion that something has to be wrong with you to get involved in a group like this. I think only an extremely selfish, narrow-minded person would not be susceptible.”

He accepted the group’s invitation to go to the farm in California for the weekend. Once there, he ignored guards at the front gate, the silly “choo-choo” game and the fact that “someone followed me everywhere I went, even to the bathroom.”

Edwards admits he found those things “silly and embarrassing, and very odd, but they seemed harmless. I thought theirs was a simplicity that could be trusted.”

And, he concedes, that as a psychology student, “part of my motivation for staying was pure curiosity. Their tactics attracted me.”

His early days with the group consisted of repetitive exercises and lectures in which “you were praised for following directions and accepting repetitive boring speeches without questioning them,” he says. “I felt confident that I couldn’t be manipulated, but I was.”

Those childish games and dogmatic speeches were exercises to break down resistance to brainwashing, he says. “I was put in a hypnotic state,” he says. “I was in a trance.”

For nearly four months, his parents — Dr. Charles Edwards. a surgeon, and his wife, Betty, of Montclair, N. J. — were blissfully unaware of what was happening to their son. It wasn’t unusual to hear little from him when he was traveling on his vacation.

Even a letter, in which he described to them his work with a Creative Community Project in Oakland, caused them no anxiety until they saw the project name again in a newspaper article.

“It was about a meeting for parents who had lost their children to cults. It indicated that Christopher’s project was part of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, the Moonies,” Dr. Edwards said in a phone conversation from his New Jersey office. “We were shocked.”

The Edwards attended the meeting, and were shocked anew. “It was supposed to be a one-hour meeting, from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.,” Dr. Edwards recalled. “It lasted until 8 p.m. There were over 500 parents there.” Unification Church membership is estimated at 80,000.  [There were never more than about 10,000 core members in the US and many of those were imported from Japan and Europe. If everyone who ever had any connection with the UC was counted the number of 30,000 might have been reached decades ago.]

After the meeting, the Edwards’ contacted Ted Patrick, the controversial “deprogrammer” who assists parents in kidnapping their children from the Moonies.

“Patrick had a three-and-a-half month waiting list,” Dr. Edwards said. While he waited for Patrick’s call, he read everything he could about the Moonies.

In January of 1976, Dr. Edwards met with Patrick to plot Christopher’s kidnaping.

The doctor closed his practice for three weeks. He flew to California, found his son after considerable searching, and said he just wanted to be sure Christopher was all right.

“I met him in a coffee shop were he worked,” Dr. Edwards said. “I saw all these kids there walking around with passive looks and mechanical movements. I thought they were in a trance, and I have had some training in hypnosis.

“I didn't say anything against the cult, and I was invited to lunch the next day. I watched recruiting techniques used on me. They looked me in the eye and spoke lovingly, flatteringly, and made me feel important.

The next day, Patrick and assistants helped Dr. Edwards pull his son out of a car and away from a fellow group member.

Dr. Edwards said the weeks of deprogramming that followed — including plane fares for five deprogrammers and assistants and a detective after the family received threatening phone calls and suffered two break-ins at their home — cost “tens of thousands of dollars.”

Christopher Edwards now lectures on cults, and has written a book about his experiences, entitled, “Crazy for God.”

“Its just coincidental that my book is coming out just when Guyana and Jonestown are making us worry about cults,” Edwards says.

“The People’s Temple suicides in Jonestown and thereafter; and an “informal” congressional hearing on cult worship last month; are heightening public anxiety about cults.

Edwards’ book provides fuel for such concern, citing mechanical movements, glassy eyes, and loss of intelligence and initiative as changes which cult members undergo hypnosis.

In one small section, where Edwards expresses hope that “a psychological test will one day emerge to verify these changes,” the book provides a scary glimpse at the potential for “psycho-war” between cults and deprogrammers.

“I fought against the deprogrammers for quite a while, and I told them I would die for my cult friends and leaders,” Edwards says “That still worries me a great deal.”

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Crazy for God: The nightmare of cult life by Christopher Edwards

The Social Organization of Recruitment in the Unification Church PDF  
 by David Frank Taylor, M.A., July 1978, Sociology

Moonwebs by Josh Freed (the book was made into a movie)

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Unification Church’s deceptive recruiting tactics - Part 1

4:00 Ford Greene “At the outset there is never a disclosure: 1) We are the Unification Church
 2) We believe that Rev. Moon is the second coming of Christ
 3) We believe that you are dominated by Satan 
4) The way for you to become free from Satan is by being unconditionally obedient to Moon because he is the only human being who has ever conquered and defeated Satan.”

1:30 Allen Tate Wood
“…The purpose of getting there is to get them off to a training center, run them through a training regimen of 7, 21 or 40 days. When that is complete that person is going to be on a bus for the next seven years, working 16 hours a day. They are not up front about that.”

Unification Church’s deceptive recruiting tactics - Part 2 5:00 Ford Greene:
 “The pitch that is always made is a pitch to conscience, is a pitch to a person’s highest, most moral inner yearnings and the ultimate result is enslavement.”

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Ford Greene on Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church