'Monkey on a Stick': From drug smuggling to murder, a gripping exposé of crime in the Hare Krishna movement

Adapted from the bestselling book co-authored by John Hubner and Lindsey Gruson, Canadian filmmaker Jason Lapeyre's documentary Monkey on a Stick looks at the criminal operations in the Hare Krishna movement, particularly in North America in the 1970s and 1980s. From drug smuggling to child sexual abuse and murder, the film dives into the shocking realities of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).

Lapeyre initially read the novel in the early 2000s and it was immediately something he knew would be a great on-screen adaptation. Initially his idea was for the novel to inspire a dramatic feature and when he optioned the book in 2016, the intention transition to a series format. But ultimately, after a show wasn't getting off the ground, a documentary materialized.

The film begins with the story of how Swami Prabhupada established this spiritual movement in New York City in 1965, quite quickly resulting in this "explosion" of devotees, with many attributing its success to the way Prabhupada was able to connect with individuals during the hippie era of culture.

Things got progressively worse in ISKCON after Prabhupada's death in 1977, when leadership was in the hands of 11 gurus from different temples.

"Instead of 11 bishops they got 11 popes trying to turn their temple into the Vatican," as it's described in the film.

At this point Lapeyre leads us through a variety of transgressions from these gurus, with titles like "The LSD Guru" and "The Rock 'n' Roll Guru," using dramatized sequences to depict what was happening, which almost makes the audience feel like you've stepped into a horror film.

As Lapeyre stressed, the guiding light for this film is Nori Muster, who was a Los Angeles-based devotee in the '70s and '80s, who worked in the public relations department of ISKCON. She's also written her own book titled "Betrayal of the Spirit: My Life behind the Headlines of the Hare Krishna Movement."

"Nori, who is someone who was right at the heart of the story for the entire time period that we're talking about, she was someone who helped me put together the list of interview subjects. She was someone who did outreach with me," Lapeyre told Yahoo Canada. "She was literally sitting beside me when we interviewed people. She would sometimes take over the interview, I would invite her [to]."

"During the editing process I was sending cuts to Nori and asking for feedback. ... I had final cut of the film, but she was someone that I really wanted to feel ownership over the final product."

In terms of getting Muster's trust to be such an active participate in this film, Lapeyre really just established with her that they shared the same agenda.

"From the moment she left the movement, she's pretty ardently devoted her life to trying to get the story out," Lapeyre said. "At one point I said to her, 'Hey by the way, if you have any old footage, like VHS tapes or films of your time in ISKCON, that's something that might be great for the documentary.' And she was like, 'Oh, I'm so sorry, Jason, I don't have anything like that. All I have is hundreds of hours of recorded interviews with all the gurus and power players in the system.' My head exploded."

"Her journalistic impulses and her archival and historical impulses to keep all that stuff became really one of the key elements of the film. And this idea of history bearing witness and the testimony, the historical evidence of the criminal activity of the gurus in the organization, was something that we really wanted to literally show on camera. So once she understood that that's what we wanted to do, I think she was all in."

'It's a plea to interrogate that desire for leadership and authority'

There's a particularly interesting conversation that Muster has with Lapeyre at the end of the film where she says, "I was an adult. I let myself be brainwashed." But we hear Lapeyre pushback a bit on how much she's almost blaming herself for her involvement in the movement.

"I wanted to include that because I don't know what the right answer is," Lapeyre said. "You can hear me sort of arguing with her, but I watch that now and I'm like, 'Am I right, or is she right?'"

"I don't know that that's a question that has a great answer, and that's ultimately what I wanted to do with the film is maybe, hopefully, have people come out of the theatre talking about that. One of the things we say about the film a lot is that it's not about Krishna Consciousness, it's about this human nature and our tendency to want leadership and to want to put our faith in authority figures. But if the film is a plea for anything, it's a plea for critical thinking and it's a plea to interrogate that desire for leadership and authority."

Something that wasn't as fleshed out in the novel, but Lapeyre really wanted to bring forward in Monkey on a Stick, is the impact of early guidance in ISKCON that women had to be submissive to men. As Muster explains in the film, women were seen and temptations for men to "fall off the spiritual path."

"If you had to point to one thing that caused almost everything else that happened, it's this decision at the very beginning of the movement that women are inferior to men," Lapeyre said. "In 2024, fortunately we've been educated a little bit, we have a little bit more of a sense that this is a power dynamic that can just easily cause abuse, and it's something that we're just starting ... to be able to recognize, but you maybe couldn't recognize in the late '70s and early 80s."

"That's why we make the point in the first 15 minutes of the film. When you make that decision that there's going to be a fundamental power dynamic based on gender in their organization, it's going to lead to almost every other abuse you see in the film. That was something that Nori recognized immediately and so hopefully it informs almost every one of the different abuses that we see in the film."

While it can be easy for viewers sitting at home to be judgemental about people not seeing the problematic signs in a movement like Hare Krishna and ISKCON, through a brilliant selection of participates who really open up about their experiences, whether born into the movement or people who are just deeply spiritual human beings, it's a comprehensive look at the need for critical thinking.

"I don't want people to go, 'Oh Go what a freak show. What a bunch of idiots,'' Lapeyre said. "John has this amazing line in the film where he says people had invested so much of themselves into the idea that this was going to work, and I think this is a dynamic that I see in myself, and I think it's something we see in online behaviour so much, which is really just behaviour now in 2024."

"I hope people come out of the film acknowledging that when you are that invested in an idea or a leader or a movement of any kind, whether it's artistic or bureaucratic or governmental or political, it is really, really hard to have that critical thinking moment of admitting that you were wrong."

Monkey on a Stick is now in select Toronto theatres, with a release in additional markets to come