Holy Smoke!
- intense
Neutral, steady, measured drama / romance, inventive in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →While on a journey of discovery in exotic India, beautiful young Ruth Barron falls under the influence of a charismatic religious guru. Her desperate parents then hire PJ Waters, a macho cult de-programmer who confronts Ruth in a remote desert hideaway. But PJ quickly learns that he's met his match in the sexy, intelligent and iron-willed Ruth.
Our read · Holy Smoke! (1999) reads as a neutral, steady, inventive drama · romance · cult entry — measured in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
More info & search links
The shape of Holy Smoke!
What watching it is actually like.
“You want a wild cult-deprogramming duel of wills between Kate Winslet and Harvey Keitel.”
Skip it tonight — Skip if explicit sexual power games and chaotic Campion tone will embarrass everyone present.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself