India is a land of cults, and whichever direction you point towards, you will find a self-declared godman who is the dictator of his universe. He is an authoritarian who declares he has a direct line with God (or, in some cases, he is the reincarnation of God), and thus, he can make the rules and do as he pleases. These self-proclaimed godmen have enough following that they could populate a small European country. Their vices are often ignored by the members of their cult, for the poor followers are too busy following the unnecessarily complicated rules they are made to live by. Netflix’s show, Unchosen, which is also set in a cult, starts by telling us that there are over 2,000 cults in the UK, and many of them hide in plain sight. This one, however, we are told, is a fictional cult called Fellowship of the Divine.After watching this opening, where you quickly find out about the excessively sexist and patriarchal rules of this particular cult, you expect a banger cult show, but Unchosen is definitely not the chosen one.ALSO READ | Beef Season 2 review: When hustling is your love language, ‘Beef’ will find youUnchosen introduces us to its protagonist Rosie (Molly Windsor), and her young daughter Grace (Olivia Pickering), and we are quickly made to understand that both Rosie and Grace aren’t thick with the rest of the cult members. The young girl is villainised for flipping pages of a comic book, and Rosie is hated for bearing just one child. The goal of the 6-episode series is set – it’s about Rosie gathering the courage to get out of here with her daughter, and you are immediately in their corner.Rosie’s husband Adam, played sheepishly by a brilliant Asa Butterfield, has no concept of consent, and uses rape as a punishment. The cult leader, Mr Phillips, played by a seemingly authoritarian Christopher Eccleston, holds this cult together while drinking copious amounts of liquor and getting handsy with the women of the cult. His wife, played by Siobhan Finneran, can see through his ways but has surrendered herself to this life, much like all the other women here. The ‘traitor’ of the cult, Isaac (Aston McAuley), is on the verge of being cast out for using a cell phone, and is thrown under the bus by his own brother Adam.The conflict arises when a drowning Grace is rescued by a mysterious stranger named Sam (Fra Fee), and Rosie, possibly for the first time in her life, is attracted to a man. Sam, turns out, is the villain of the story, but the show can’t really make up its mind for at least half of its duration. They go back and forth between presenting Sam, an escaped prisoner, as a victim of his circumstances and declaring him a murderous psychopath. Fra Fee chooses to play him as a sexy, misunderstood saviour in some scenes and a scheming psychopath in the others, as if they want to deliberately mislead the audience, but to what end? At one point, Sam is literally chasing down Mr Phillips to kill him, and you wonder what the show expects its audience to do – cheer for the harasser, or for the murderer?Unchosen wants to present itself as a cult show, but never really leans into it, unless it wants to use the cult’s restrictions as a plot point. No one can verify Sam’s background because the cult members are prohibited from using the internet. We are told that the members of this cult don’t trust the police, and so the police also lazily show up once in a while, like they are in a 1970s Hindi movie, and don’t really bother with any investigation, even though Sam’s escape from prison is presented like the biggest news in this city. It gets pretty evident, pretty quickly, that this show isn’t about a cult, but about a con artist, where the central character isn’t Rosie, but Sam.Story continues below this ad Fra Fee plays Sam in Unchosen.Fra Fee was possibly told to play Sam as a mysterious trickster but what good is a trickster if you can’t really discover his true intentions until the very end? When he claims to be in love with Rosie, one tends to believe him, and when he tries to kill her, you believe that he has no control over his rage. When he manipulates Adam into a sexual relationship, you see his sly ways but the same conniving strategy goes out of the window when he threatens Rosie’s little daughter. Sam comes across as a mishmash of different personalities, and it doesn’t feel like this is by design.Since the show gives us its goal in the beginning – of Rosie’s exit from the cult – you keep waiting for that moment to arrive, but every chance she gets to escape, she only declares her intentions to another character. It makes sense for her to take time to gather some courage as she questions the belief system that she was raised with, but even after we are more than halfway through the show, she is no closer to getting out than she was in the beginning.Created and written by Julie Gearey, Unchosen doesn’t impress as a cult show. It doesn’t even impress as a show about a con artist. This is even more surprising as it comes from the UK arm of Netflix, which otherwise has a better hit rate than its US counterpart. Even with cult shows, which is one of the most popular sub-genres within the true crime genre, Unchosen remains mediocre through and through.