Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story

The God Complex in the Guest House

In the modern digital landscape, the "monster" rarely looks like a monster. It looks like a solution. It looks like a life coach, a therapist, or a "Mom of Truth" offering absolute certainty in a chaotic world. Skye Borgman, the documentarian who peeled back the suburban wallpaper in *Abducted in Plain Sight* and *Girl in the Picture*, understands this camouflage better than almost anyone working in non-fiction cinema today. With *Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story*, Borgman moves her lens away from the headline-grabbing "shiny object"—the parenting YouTuber Ruby Franke—to focus on the darker, denser gravitational pull that destroyed a family: Jodi Hildebrandt. The result is a film that is less about the sensationalism of crime and more about the terrifying architecture of coercion.



Borgman’s visual language in *Evil Influencer* is clinical, mirroring the sterile, "therapeutic" environment Hildebrandt cultivated. Where other true crime documentaries might lean into shadowy reenactments or ominous drone shots of jagged mountains, Borgman uses the banal footage of Hildebrandt’s own business, "ConneXions," against her. We see the stark white walls, the uncomfortable eye contact, and the flat, corporate lighting of her training videos. By juxtaposing this imagery with the red dust and brutal heat of the Utah desert where the abuse took place, Borgman creates a sensory dissonance. The film suggests that the evil wasn't hiding in the dark; it was hiding in the harsh, overexposed light of a webcam, packaged as "truth."

The narrative strength of the film lies in its refusal to simply treat Ruby Franke as a victim-turned-perpetrator. Instead, it dissects the mechanism of Hildebrandt’s control—a weaponized form of therapy that redefined love as pain and isolation as righteousness. Borgman treats the "ConneXions" curriculum not just as a plot point, but as a contagion. We watch as the vocabulary of self-help is twisted into a cage. The most chilling moments aren't necessarily the descriptions of physical abuse—though they are harrowing—but the quiet recordings of Hildebrandt’s voice, calm and authoritative, dismantling the psyches of grown men and women until they thanked her for their own destruction.

Ultimately, *Evil Influencer* serves as a grim autopsy of the "expert" culture. It asks the audience to examine their own vulnerability to figures who promise to fix everything if we just surrender our intuition. The climax of the film—the escape of the Franke child—feels less like a triumph and more like a gasp for air after being underwater for years. Borgman doesn’t offer a neat resolution because, for the survivors, the trauma of having their reality rewritten by a "trusted" mentor doesn't end with an arrest. This is a sober, essential watch that reminds us that the most dangerous influencers aren't selling products; they are selling a distorted version of reality, and the cost of subscription is the soul.