Few figures in modern spirituality are as controversial as Osho, and few documentaries are as diametrically opposed in their portrayal of him as Wild Wild Country and Osho: The Movie. One is a gripping exposé of power, deception, and unchecked ambition, the other is a carefully curated PR campaign disguised as a film. Watching them back to back feels like stepping into two entirely different realities; one where Osho is a megalomaniacal cult leader presiding over a criminal enterprise, and another where he is a peaceful sage tragically undone by his own followers. The only real question is: which one is selling you a bigger illusion?
Wild Wild Country, the Netflix documentary that took the world by storm in 2018, is an absolute rollercoaster of madness, crime, and spectacle. It doesn’t need to embellish because the real story is stranger than fiction. A charismatic guru moves his thousands of red-robed followers to a small Oregon town, builds a utopian city, and then; because utopian cities never go as planned; everything descends into wiretapping, arson, bioterror attacks, and assassination plots. It’s a documentary that unfolds like a thriller, letting a cast of ex-Rajneeshees, Oregon locals, and law enforcement officials piece together a story that keeps getting wilder by the minute. At its centre, though largely silent for much of the runtime, is Osho himself; his presence looming over every act of devotion, every shady legal manoeuvre, every whispered conspiracy. When he does finally break his silence, it’s to throw his once-loyal secretary Ma Anand Sheela under the bus in the most passive-aggressively divine way possible.
And then there’s Osho: The Movie, a film that seems to exist primarily to rehabilitate Osho’s image, or at the very least, to make sure no one blames him for anything. Here, he is the wise master, the enlightened rebel, the man too evolved to concern himself with petty things like immigration fraud or poisoning an entire town’s salad bars. If Wild Wild Country suggests Osho might have been complicit in the darker elements of his movement, Osho: The Movie insists he was just meditating while his empire crumbled around him. The film bends over backward to absolve him, casting Sheela as the power-hungry villain who took things too far while Osho, poor innocent Osho, simply wanted to spread his message of love. Never mind that he had a fleet of Rolls-Royces or that his movement collapsed in a spectacular mess of legal battles and criminal convictions; the film would rather you focus on his radiant presence and misunderstood genius.
The biggest difference between the two films is how they treat the moral complexity of the story. Wild Wild Country doesn’t hand you a simple answer. It acknowledges that many Rajneeshees were sincere seekers who got caught up in something far bigger than themselves, that Osho was undeniably charismatic and visionary, but also that the movement was riddled with corruption, cult-like behaviour, and outright criminality. It doesn’t tell you who to believe—it simply lays out the chaos and lets you decide. Osho: The Movie, on the other hand, has no such interest in ambiguity. It isn’t here to make you think; it’s here to make you admire Osho. It cherry-picks the narrative, downplays the scandals, and frames the entire collapse of Rajneeshpuram as the tragic consequence of a few bad apples, rather than the inevitable implosion of an empire built on unchecked power.
If Wild Wild Country is an unsparing dissection of a movement that spiralled out of control, Osho: The Movie is spiritual fan fiction, written for those who still want to believe. One presents the Gita rewritten as a courtroom drama; the other, as a self-help book with all the inconvenient parts removed. The truth, as always, is probably somewhere in the middle; but only one of these films is actually interested in finding it.
My enduring takeaway from watching both documentaries is to hold Osho up as a spiritually developed man who ultimately became drug-addicted (particularly to laughing gas) and by degrees lost control of his own mass movement to opportunistic egoists. While there is no official diagnosis or historical evidence suggesting Osho was autistic, some of his traits invite speculation. His intense focus on certain philosophical ideas, unconventional communication style, disregard for social norms, and periods of isolation could align with characteristics seen in autism. However, Osho was also highly charismatic, performative, and skilled at manipulating social dynamics; traits more commonly linked to personality disorders like narcissism. While it’s unlikely Osho was autistic in a clinical sense, viewing him through a neurodivergent lens opens up intriguing possibilities about how his mind worked and what fuelled his radical approach to life and spirituality.
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