Stream It or Skip It?

The events chronicled in true crime documentary Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story (now on Netflix) already may be familiar to you – perhaps through news stories about a disturbing Utah 2023 child abuse case that resulted in the conviction of therapist/life coach Hildebrandt and her business partner, former YouTuber Ruby Franke. Or perhaps through the multiple other chunks of content that have already covered it: Investigation Discovery series Ruby and Jodi: A Cult of Sin and Influence debuted earlier this year, as did an episode of the same network’s series The Curious Case of… and Hulu’s Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke doc series; Lifetime movie Mormon Mom Gone Wrong: The Ruby Franke Story, starring Heather Locklear as Hildebrandt preceded all this stuff with its 2024 release. So Netflix is behind the curve of the exploitation zeitgeist for this one, which pretty much falls in line with the rest of the streamer’s onslaught of true crime content. 

The Gist: On Aug. 30, 2023, an unnamed resident of Washington County, Utah got a knock on the door. It was a young boy, asking for help. He had no shoes. His wrists and ankles were wrapped with plastic wrap and duct tape. He was severely emaciated and asking for food and water. We hear the 911 call, and see footage from the doorbell camera and police bodycams. Even the first responders are visibly upset by the boy’s condition. He had escaped from a nearby home in this affluent development, that of Jodi Hildebrandt. Police banged on the door of Hildebrandt’s 10,000 square-foot, $5 million house and performed a safety check. They pushed past Hildebrandt and found a young girl, the boy’s sister, her head shaved and locked in a closet. They also found the mother of the children, Ruby Franke, almost non-responsive, mostly silent with a distant look in her eye. The children were taken to the hospital, insisting they deserved what happened to them. The women were arrested. What the hell was going on in that house?

Some background first: For years, Hildebrandt worked as a therapist and life coach for couples and families in the Mormon Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with a focus on “sexual addiction” and related issues; she dubbed her business ConneXions, offering video advice, literature, support groups and various other services. Franke was a “mommy vlogger” on a YouTube channel called 8 Passengers, a reference to herself, husband Kevin Franke and their six children; she shared stuff from their daily family life, couched within the LDS community, and had gathered two million followers and more than a billion views. The Frankes hired Hildebrandt to counsel them on their rebellious teenage son. Eventually, Hildebrandt and Ruby Franke became business partners, launching ConneXions together as a YouTube channel, offering further LDS-related counseling.

How these two women got to the point of punishing and torturing children for allegedly having “the devil” inside them is told through several talking heads: Detective Jessica Bate, who handled the case for the county police. Eric Clarke, a Washington County attorney who charged the women with multiple instances of child abuse. Ethan Prete is a former client of Hildebrandt’s, and accuses her of wrecking his marriage by encouraging his wife to deprive him of sex, and seeing his baby daughter. Ethan’s story of being forcibly estranged from his wife and child for a year is mirrored by police questioning-room footage of Kevin Franke, who also was forcibly estranged from Ruby and his children for a year, and is devastated to learn that his wife had been torturing their son and daughter. One commentator says this is “definitely a Mormon story,” and another opines, “I don’t know if it could’ve happened anywhere else.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Evil Influencer director Skye Borgman has quite the track record in Netflix true crime junk: Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, American Murder: Laci Peterson, Girl in the Picture, episodes of Unsolved Mysteries and I Just Killed My Dad among them.

Performance Worth Watching: It’s easy to appreciate the steady hand of a commenter like Bate, who sticks to calm, sober testimonials. In fact, none of the talking heads in this doc are attention-hog types – a rarity for this genre.

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: No surprise that the title Evil Influencer is grossly sensationalist – that’s how Netflix gets you to press play, you know – but ultimately the content of the film isn’t quite so icky. It lacks the gross manipulation of timelines that holds us in suspense for a big reveal (Unknown Number did this, leaving viewers gobsmacked), with Borgman instead opting for a fairly straightforward iteration of events in old-school newsmagazine style. She leans on talking heads, FOIA police footage and recordings of prison phone calls to tell this awful story.

The idea at the heart of this miserable display of human behavior is how Hildebrandt exploited some core tenets of Mormonism to manipulate people for power and money. The big one was an absurdly loose definition of “sexual addiction”; Hildebrandt often convinced women that their husbands were engaging in deviant behavior – looking at porn once in a year was enough – and that those men needed to be cut off entirely from their families. The church’s harshly conservative stance on sex provided the basis for Hildebrandt’s “treatment,” and the context implied that such actions were within the realm of reason. On top of that, she charged large sums of money for her “therapy,” with one couple admitting to having paid her a total of $50,000 to help “save” their marriage.

Sex, religion, brainwashing – there’s a lot of juicy content here, and it’s odd to see Evil Influencer lean away from that, not because it’s sordid, but because that’s the true heart of this story. The film often brushes past its own subtext, rarely transcending the surface-level retelling or delving into Hildebrandt’s distorted psychology. She convinced Franke that her children were possessed by evil that could only be exorcised via torture (note, one verbal description of a child being hogtied is thoroughly upsetting). How do people reach that moral vacuum? Clarke, an LDS member, correctly asserts that Hildebrandt is the exception and not the rule within the church – and that’s it. Borgman all but shrugs it off as “extremism,” and ends the documentary. No detail, no depth, no analysis. We now know what happened, and I guess it’s up to us to figure out why, because the documentary doesn’t seem particularly interested in that. 

Our Call: Evil Influencer’s flimsiness underscores its inability to justify its existence as a piece of worthwhile journalism. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.