Waiting for John (2014)
There's a moment watching this film where you have to stop and remind yourself that what you're seeing is not fiction. An entire community on a tiny island in Vanuatu, genuinely, fervently waiting for a white American soldier called John Frum to descend from the sky and deliver them consumer goods. Radios. Canned food. The miraculous bounty of capitalism, dropped straight from the heavens. It sounds like something Cleese and Palin dreamed up over lunch, but the John Frum movement is absolutely real, and it has been going for decades. That premise alone is enough to get you through the door.
The question is whether Jessica Sherry's documentary does justice to it, and the honest answer is: only partly.
Let me start with what works, because there's genuine gold here. The archival footage from an older documentary on the Cargo Cult is the film's real standout, not least because it features a young David Attenborough, which I genuinely did not see coming. That material roots everything in a longer historical context and makes clear that this isn't some recently manufactured curiosity. These people have been waiting a long time. There's something quietly staggering about that, and the archival sequences capture it in a way the modern footage sometimes struggles to match.
The most compelling idea the film puts forward, almost in passing, is that John Frum may never have actually existed at all. That he might be a collective spiritual hallucination, possibly fuelled by the ritual, heavy consumption of Kava. It's a brilliant thread to pull on, and when the film briefly tugs at it, you sit up straighter. Because it draws an almost unavoidable parallel to mainstream Christianity and to the broader human tendency to construct a messianic figure who promises abundance just around the corner, if you'll only keep the faith a little longer. That's rich, provocative territory. The kind of territory a sharper documentary would have planted its flag in and refused to leave.
But Sherry doesn't quite go there. The film observes more than it interrogates. It's relatively surface-level in its approach to the socio-political mechanics of why this belief system has not only survived but persisted across generations, and what it tells us about colonialism, about faith, about the psychology of hope deferred. Those questions are hovering just offscreen throughout, and the documentary never fully invites them in. It's frustrating, because the raw material is extraordinary.
I reviewed Leitis in Waiting a while back, another documentary rooted in a Pacific Island community navigating identity and tradition, and what that film had that this one lacks is a willingness to sit with its subjects long enough to find the real complexity underneath. Here, the observation stays polite when it could afford to be a bit more probing.
None of which makes Waiting for John a bad watch. It absolutely isn't. It's engaging in the way a well-produced magazine feature is engaging. You'll finish it curious, you'll bring it up at dinner, and someone across the table will say "wait, this is real?" And that conversation alone will probably be worth the runtime. The subject matter carries a lot of the weight, and Sherry at least has the good sense to get out of its way and let the strangeness breathe.
Three stars. An interesting curiosity rather than the definitive piece of journalism this story deserves. If someone does eventually make that version, with the depth and rigour to match the astonishing premise, it could be one of the great documentaries about faith and myth. This one gestures toward that film without quite becoming it.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2014 | Watched: 2026-07-27
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