This three-part documentary about women who were exploited and duped into sex work is filled with astonishing detail – while being sensitive to its interviewees
Y
ou are invited to an exclusive yoga retreat at “the villa”. When you arrive, it’s a grim building in Romania in which women cavort in micro-bikinis and drink each other’s urine after a mass orgy. You are summoned to meet a spiritual guru in Paris. When you arrive, a woman wraps your sim card in tin foil and drives you to the suburbs. Later you are taken to a dingy flat where you are expected to have hours-long sex with an elderly man whom you must “transfigure” into a less undesirable entity.
If this were a dream, you’d probably wake up disturbed by the weirdness of your subconscious. But for a number of women, this surreally terrifying chain of events was no nightmare. While the finer details of Twisted Yoga’s tale may be intriguingly wild, the broader picture is infuriating and sad.
The first person we meet is Ashleigh, a smiley Australian with a penchant for the alternative (ghosts, astrology, numerology). She moves to London in her 20s and reconnects with a friend who recommends a yoga studio. It specialises in a specific kind: tantra. Yes, the very same practice that for a certain generation will unfortunately always bring to mind Sting’s 1990s bedroom-based revelations. But tantra isn’t merely about pleasure, it also involves the communion of spiritual knowledge, an “extreme expansion of the field of consciousness” so mysterious it cannot be articulated by any of the once devoted followers here.
