Director: Ben Kitnick
A cult member wakes up the morning after his group's planned mass suicide fizzles out, and instead of soul-searching, he goes right back to recruiting in Let's Start a Cult.
What is Let's Start a Cult about?
Comedian Stavros Halkias plays a devoted, deeply obnoxious follower whose entire identity is built around belonging to a fringe group — so when the group's apocalyptic plans collapse and its members scatter, he refuses to let go of the dream. He tracks down his former leader, played with weary resignation, and talks him into one more attempt at building a following, this time from scratch and with far fewer resources. The 2024 comedy leans into deadpan absurdity rather than shock value, mining laughs from the gap between the characters' total sincerity and how transparently unqualified they are to lead anyone. Wes Haney, Eric Rahill, Daniel Simonsen, and a rotating cast of oddball recruits fill out a small-scale, low-budget world that mirrors the shabby reality behind most doomsday movements.
Cast & crew
Stavros Halkias carries the film with the same blunt, unfiltered comic voice familiar from his stand-up work, playing a man too committed to his own delusions to notice how ridiculous they sound out loud. His former-leader co-star provides a quieter counterpoint, a man who has clearly lost faith in the whole enterprise but can't think of anything better to do with his time. Wes Haney, Eric Rahill, and Daniel Simonsen round out an ensemble of new recruits whose motivations are more mundane — boredom, loneliness, bad luck — than anything ideological.
Context & significance
Let's Start a Cult belongs to a small but steady line of American independent comedies that use cult culture as a lens for loneliness and the hunger to belong, rather than as pure horror material. Director Ben Kitnick keeps the production scrappy and contained, matching the low-stakes, low-budget world its characters are trying — and mostly failing — to build. The film's satire lands less on any specific real-world group and more on the universal appeal of certainty to people who feel adrift.
Where & how to watch
Let's Start a Cult is available on K-Time with a free account login, and the title page itself is open to browse before signing in. K-Time's Farsi interface and subtitle support make an English-language comedy like this one accessible to Persian-speaking audiences without losing the timing that makes deadpan humor work.