Phoenix Rising, review: Evan Rachel Wood’s searing allegations against Marilyn Manson

In February 2018, the actress Evan Rachel Wood appeared in front of US Congress to testify about her personal experience of rape and sexual assault. She shared a number of highly distressing details about the abuse she says she had suffered, but the name of her abuser was not among them. That followed three years later in a brief message posted on Instagram: Wood alleged it was Marilyn Manson, the controversy-courting rock star with whom Wood had shared a highly publicised relationship in the late ’00s.

This blazingly courageous two-part documentary, the first part of which premiered at Sundance last night, makes clear why it took Wood so long to reach the point where she was capable of pressing “send” on that statement. Amy Berg’s film recounts Wood’s years-long ordeal allegedly at Manson’s hands, but also the further years of post-traumatic despair that followed, then years more of life-consuming legwork as she makes contact with other women he is accused of torturing and tormenting, and begins the fight to try him in court. (Manson, real name Brian Warner, has consistently denied Wood’s and all other allegations, a denial that the documentary repeats.)

As its title suggests, Phoenix Rising is as much about the long-term climb from the ashes as the fiery pit itself. But once the story has been set out, you find yourself awed that Wood was ever able to reach an altitude at which she felt able to speak out. “I made a new friend,” she reads aloud from her childhood diary about the night she met Manson at a party in Los Angeles.

He was a 37-year-old pop-culture fixture, she an 18-year-old newcomer whose growing reputation for troubled-teen roles belied a sheltered childhood. Her diary entries show that she initially saw Manson as a friendly if eccentric mentor figure, and was flattered by his seemingly avid interest in her opinions and artistic tastes. But as they continued to meet, she claims that he began fishing for compromising information while cutting her off from family and friends – a process which, in the cold light of adulthood, Wood now recognises as grooming.

What follows is horrific, often baroquely so. During the filming of Manson’s music video Heart Shaped Glasses, she accuses him of forcibly penetrating her without warning during the filming of a sex scene, in order to obtain footage he would later use as a source of did-they-didn’t-they sniggering controversy. Wood was 19 at the time, and too terrified to do anything but alleges that “I was essentially raped on camera”.

She talks about allegedly being kept awake for days on end, having her communications monitored, being given drugs she suspects were spiked with methamphetamine, waking up to find Manson allegedly raping her as she slept. There is an extraordinary moment when she claims that the treatment she was subject to is tantamount to human trafficking. Wood, who is Jewish, also tells of what she believes is a recurring anti-Semitic aspect to Manson’s behaviour: she recalls that when she once tried to smooth things over with him after a temporary break-up, he responded (she claims) by tying her up and flogging her with a whip from the Holocaust – one of the items she says is in his Nazi memorabilia collection.

Interviews with Wood’s family provide valuable context, both in terms of her turbulent childhood and the view from outside during the Manson years. At one point, her brother Ira perceptively calls Manson “a wolf in wolf’s clothing”: everyone was so fixated on his outrageous image that they didn’t notice (or, in the case of the music industry, care) that the image was exactly who he was. You can feel the fresh air rushing into the room as the film exposes the oft-made claim that Manson’s work was offering some kind of ironic commentary on sadism and misogyny. The commentary was the smokescreen, the work the byproduct, the sadism and misogyny the point.

I sometimes found myself wishing Berg would be harder on Manson’s alleged enablers: perhaps the saddest recurring image in Phoenix Rising is Wood’s look of grateful disbelief whenever one of his former associates publicly backs her version of events. Even so, Berg has pieced together a complex, harrowing story with sensitivity and transparency, and Wood has met her with unsparing lucidity. It’s a film that deserves to cause an outcry.

Cert tbc, 154 mins. Dir: Amy Berg. Screening at the Sundance Film Festival. A UK release has yet to be announced