Self-Help (2025)
Directed by Erik Bloomquist
Screenplay by Erik & Carson Bloomquist
Starring Landry Bender, Jake Weber, Amy Hargreaves, Madison Lintz, & Erik Bloomquist.

Horror / Thriller

★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SLIGHT SPOILERS!
Turn back, lest ye be spoiled.

As a director, Erik Bloomquist has covered plenty ground both in terms of genre and theme, going from his 2018 debut feature Long Lost—a thriller that I, myself, described as a ‘social mind bender’—to his follow-up feature Ten Minutes to Midnight, a slick and smart vampire horror, to a mix of different things between Weekenders, Night at the Eagle Inn, Christmas on the Carousel, She Came from the Woods, and Founders Day. It’s safe to say that with his latest film, Self-Help, Bloomquist is once again establishing a deserved place in the horror genre. The film follows a young woman named Olivia (Landry Bender) whose troubled past has put distance between her and her mother, Rebecca (Amy Hargreaves). When Olivia discovers her mother’s become part of a self-help community, otherwise known as a cult, she tries to infiltrate the group. Except the group’s led by Curtis Clark (Jake Weber), a devious, intelligent leader who’ll push his followers to their absolute limits, and Olivia finds herself in a battle of wits that’ll determine her own well-being.

Self-Help is a story about not running away from the painful parts of our past, especially if they involve family, or else that pain will find a way of coming back around again like an ugly boomerang. Olivia’s struggle with her mother is the struggle of many, albeit their backstory is a tad bit wilder than many child-parent relationships. And while there are plenty of good reasons for people to cut their parents out of their lives, it’s always good to cauterise that wound somehow if you don’t want it to continue bleeding all over the remainder of your life. Bloomquist’s film has a playful tone about it, though the message underneath is a very real, very serious one about how people choose to deal with their pain and the consequences of those choices. More specifically, the film digs into how a parent’s negative choices can reverberate terribly through the lives of their children.
Curtis’s cult leader worldview urges people with trauma in their past to run away, or push away those involved, to excise the painful portions of their life and move on without another thought. A lot of that urging goes towards parents who have issues with their children, too. Firmly opposed to Curtis, the film itself, and Olivia’s story in it, urges people with trauma to stay in it, even if it’s painful, because if you don’t then it—whatever it is for each individual—will only come back to find you again later, one way or another; in the immortal words of Debbie Harry, it’s gonna find ya, it’s gonna getchagetchagetchagetcha. Olivia’s relationship with Rebecca is fractured and it seems neither of them have done anything to fix it. Self-Help begins with a scene that intertwines sex and death in the life of little Olivia, as she witnesses Rebecca getting banged behind the curtains of a Halloween carnival, then a shocking moment of violence follows due to the fact she believed her mother was being attacked. Right off the bat, bad parenting is on display with Rebecca cheating on her husband and doing it at a carnival where her daughter’s wandering around. The worst of it is Rebecca seems to sweep all that under the rug. She and Olivia clearly never dealt with what happened, which becomes evident the more the film wears on. Later in the film, Olivia spits in Rebecca’s face to which her mother replies stoically: “Whatever you need, I‘ll receive it.” The irony is Rebecca will take spit in the face yet won’t offer any real apologies or genuine, heartfelt explanations for the way she acts, nor for how she treats her own daughter. She’s forever under Curtis’s spell. Rebecca’s robotic attitude towards Olivia is part of a larger theme in Self-Help about getting involved with the wrong people.

Self-Help does great work by depicting the harmful fallout from getting involved with grifting sleazebags like Curtis, and also the harm inherent in getting involved with any kind of ideology that pushes its followers towards shirking accountability for their actions. Many cult leaders, while putting on an act like they ‘look inward’ to reflect on themselves and encourage their followers to do the same, actually encourage—sometimes even threaten—their followers to cut families and friends out of their lives. Scientology is probably most famous in this regard; however, this quality isn’t exclusive to them. Curtis works along the same wavelength. He encourages mothers and fathers most of all to cut their children out of their lives rather than actually dealing with whatever issues might exist between them. In one scene, a mother named Joanne burns a locket, encouraged by Curtis, as she denies any responsibility in her own family falling apart, laying all the blame at her son’s feet.

It isn’t only family and friends Curtis encourages cutting out. Joanne carves a tattoo off her arm: “No more reminders of before.” One of the older men, Andy, in Curtis’s cult is driven to a gruesome act of disfiguration in order to ‘see’ something that’s merely another product of Curtis’s long, awful con. It’s darkly comic that Curtis refuses the cult label by saying: “Cults want people to stay. I want them to move on.” Sadly, we later see Joanne and Andy have been cast out from the cult, presented as a positive ‘moving on’ after their respective sacrifices. Curtis still retains the control of a cult leader, even if his followers have gone out into the real world once more; he’s left an indelible mark on them in a profoundly negative way. Andy and Joanne have real, likely lifelong scars, but they’re forever scarred even deeper, scarred psychologically, no matter if they understand that or not.
Self-Help is a fierce attack on leaders, cult or otherwise, who prey on the vulnerable by pushing the fallacy that they’re the only ones who can help people actualise their truest, best self. A well-framed shot in one of the final scenes reveals Curtis’s education and the field in which he works; it makes him feel even more sleazy and opportunistic than he already does throughout the film. Curtis is not a genuine cult leader, his heart isn’t truly in it; he’s in it solely so he can drain people of their money and accumulate more wealth—sounds an awful lot like another leader currently wreaking havoc on peoples’ personal and financial lives after conning many into believing he’s the only one who can fix things.

Bloomquist’s film is at times hard hitting, such as in the scene when Olivia confronts Rebecca by asking “Do you love me?” and Rebecca responds: “I used to.” The story isn’t entirely about cults or cult leader influence, it’s ultimately about the mistakes parents make when raising their children and how ignoring those mistakes only lets darkness into the lives of all involved. Self-Help is unsettling and depressing in equal measure. Nevertheless, the film’s ending leaves room for the hope that children raised by narcissistic parents can find a way forward, without or without those parents in their lives, though hopefully it involves a lot less violence than it did for Olivia.