The Natural State Review: A Guru Who Promised Nothing

By Tom Whitfield

"Could I have wasted 35 years of my life?" That question, asked by a follower of the "anti-guru" U. G. Krishnamurti, opens the central wound of The Natural State, the documentary by Matthew Dougherty screening at the 2026 Woodstock Film Festival.

The film builds its portrait from hundreds of hours of camcorder footage shot by Julie Thayer, a wealthy New Yorker who abandoned her life in 1989 to follow Krishnamurti. Dougherty cuts that grainy archive with present-day reflective interviews. The result is a study of a man who claimed enlightenment while spending his life questioning enlightenment itself.

The biography is stark. After an abstract, life-changing incident in 1967, U. G. Krishnamurti left his family and the path that had prepared him to be a holy man. He had spent years following Jiddu Krishnamurti, the older Indian spiritual figure, before concluding that Jiddu's teachings were fraudulent. Challenging them became his life's work.

What did he actually offer?

Nothing — by his own account. He refused donations and refused followers, yet accepted the fame his following brought him. The film's talking heads debate that last point in the back half. His devotees sought him out to be "blasted": insulted and ridiculed for their material desires and egotistical worries. Thayer became one of his most devout pupils and, by the evidence here, one of his easiest targets. "Why are you doing this to me, Julie?" he asks her at one point in the footage.

He claimed to live in a "natural state" — hyper-aware, as he described it, of the uselessness of searching for meaning. Yet people who spent time around him consistently describe something else. Executive producer Jane Campion, a friend of U. G.'s, recalls the "energy field" she felt around him and how it made her feel almost drunk. After his death, some followers reported strange phenomena. Others dismissed those memories, insisting his death was ordinary — exactly as he insisted his life was.

The contradiction is the subject, and Dougherty does not resolve it. Here is a skeptic's caution worth naming: a documentary about a man who promised nothing cannot be criticized for delivering few answers, but it can be asked what its archive proves. The film's strength is that it seems aware of this.

Why the camcorder footage matters

Thayer's footage has an aesthetic argument of its own. Grainy and abrupt, it carries a percussive quality that makes U. G. appear more mean and more honest at the same time — a fitting texture for Dougherty's complex tones. At one point someone asks Julie why she films everything. She says she "feels safer" behind the camera. The people seeking liberation from their ego through U. G.'s insults were, plainly, seeking something more than that.

The reviewer's touchstone is the line attributed to Groucho Marx: "I wouldn't want to belong to a club that would have me as a member." There is a parallel contradiction in identifying as an atheist at all — subscribing to a uniform non-belief negates the presumed reason for not believing in something.

What does this change for the viewer?

Not much, and that appears to be the point. Throughout the film, U. G. seems mostly genuine in his non-beliefs, while his followers seem earnest and thoughtful in their pursuit of modesty. Dougherty is described as frankly brave for offering a film with no good answers. Is anybody bettered by U. G.'s teachings, or by his meanness? Maybe, maybe not. It matters only if the person being helped believes they are being helped — which returns the film to its founding problem: believing in something.

And 'round and 'round it goes. For audiences at Woodstock, The Natural State stands as a rare festival entry willing to leave its central question — those 35 wasted years, or not — squarely with the viewer.