HBO’s New Documentary Takes On an Infamous “White Savior,” but There’s a Twist

A woman stands in a doorway, light flooding the air around her. The walls are dense with photographs arranged in uneven rows, but you can’t make out more than the shape and the color of the people in them, because the focus is solely on her—head bowed, arms outstretched, as if her body is an antenna carefully pointed at the heavens. Everything else is a blur.

The woman is Renée Bach, an evangelical Christian missionary at the center of the three-part HBO docuseries Savior Complex. In 2009, Bach, then 19, founded a nonprofit in Jinja, Uganda, called Serving His Children, which was focused on feeding the area’s malnourished children. (According to a 2019 report from UNICEF, a third of Ugandan children suffer the long-term effects of malnutrition, and it is responsible for 4 out of 10 deaths in children under age 5.) Because the children who came to Serving His Children for food tended to be sick in other ways, the facility unofficially took on the functions of a medical center—and because Bach saw herself as someone who had been called to the task by God, she felt empowered to assume some of those functions herself, without being licensed or formally trained. As the saying that gives Savior Complex’s first episode its title goes, “God doesn’t call the qualified. He qualifies the called.”

That image of Bach standing amid Serving His Children’s wooden cots, surrounded by photos of Ugandan children, was used in the organization’s fundraising materials, and it’s a perfect encapsulation of how Bach saw herself, or at least wanted to be seen: as a vessel for God’s will, saving both lives and souls. “Each picture,” she tells the cameras, “represents one life changed.” But the photograph becomes a weapon to be used against her, particularly by the activist group No White Saviors, which accused Bach of fraud, negligence, and bearing the responsibility for the deaths of more than 100 children in Serving His Children’s care. The young white woman is centered, distinct, the African children whose lives she claims to have changed reduced to blurry background detail. When the picture appears on No White Saviors’ Instagram feed at the end of Savior Complex’s second episode, it does so under a caption reading “Angel of Death.”

For much of its first two episodes, Savior Complex flops between these two perspectives, leaning heavily toward the second. The opening shots feel like the setup for a true crime exposé, with Bach cooking dinner for her adopted Ugandan daughter and referencing newspaper headlines calling her a “serial killer,” which the documentary leaves uncontextualized for maximum shock value. Jackie Kramlich, an American nurse who volunteered at Serving His Children, describes her increasing horror as she worked alongside Bach, watching her administer medical care she was not trained to provide, a combination of ignorance and arrogance that put children’s lives in danger. And No White Saviors, a group led by Olivia Alaso, a Black Ugandan, and Kelsey Nielsen, an American who describes herself as a “white savior in recovery,” push the charges substantially further, accusing Bach of conducting medical experiments on the children. As far as they’re concerned, she’s a murderer who belongs in prison, and they’re not going to stop until she’s behind bars.

HBO is spreading Savior Complex’s broadcast over two nights rather than three weeks, and it released all the episodes to streaming at the same time. (The final two episodes air tonight, but they’re all already available to stream on Max.) It turns out to be a wise move, because by the end of its second episode, I was so frustrated with what felt like its tendentious point of view that I was reluctant to press play on the third. Bach’s behavior is questionable at best, but No White Saviors’ approach seems equally reckless and self-aggrandizing, lobbing indiscriminate accusations for social media clout with no regard for what the collateral damage might be. Bach is an easy target—as she reads from an accusatory comment left by Nielsen on Serving His Children’s Facebook page, she stumbles over the word neocolonialism, trying it several times before giving up entirely. But I kept thinking back to Bach’s statement, early in the series, that she’s “taken the hit for every white person who ever stepped foot in Uganda,” which, while betraying a characteristic lack of self-reflection and a hint of martyrdom—at one point, she says a photo of her injecting fluid into a child’s head through an intravenous catheter has been used to “crucify me”—doesn’t seem entirely wrong. Abner Tagoola, the head of pediatrics at Jinja Hospital, calmly turns the crusade back on the filmmakers when he points out, “You have come all the way from America for one person.”

The shoe finally drops in the middle of the series’ final episode, “Reap What You Sow.” No White Saviors splinters over the allegation that Nielsen misappropriated funds, which Nielsen denied—according to a 2022 report in the Guardian, the debate over whether it was appropriate for a white person to have a prominent role in the organization was also a contributing factor—and the charges against Bach collapse due to a lack of evidence, although she does agree to pay small settlements to the mothers of two children who died after seeking treatment at Serving His Children. But more importantly, the episode is the first to give real prominence to Ugandan voices. The key figure in the story’s final chapter isn’t Bach or Nielsen but Primah Kwagala, the civil rights lawyer who presses the mothers’ civil suit against Bach. As the rhetorical war between Bach and No White Saviors escalates—Bach flees back to her home in rural Virginia after the “Angel of Death” post sparks death threats—Kwagala remains even-keeled and focused on serving the bereaved mothers rather than building up an image of herself. She, like Tagoola, is mindful of the bigger picture. Online activist groups like No White Saviors are great at drawing attention to injustice, but outrage burns too hot to sustain long-term solutions, while people like Bach have access to faith-based fundraising networks that also insulate them from accountability. No White Saviors succeeds in toxifying Serving His Children’s brand, but it’s not clear what if anything will replace the work that it did. “Who’s serving those people now?” Bach asks. “Is it Kelsey? She hasn’t posted about it once, so I’m pretty sure it’s not happening.”

The idea that Nielsen couldn’t possibly have done something good without documenting it on social media is staggering both in its presumptuousness and its apparent accuracy. And Bach, who detailed her work in a string of blog posts, seems no different. When the filmmakers confront her over Jackie Kramlich’s accusation that she gave a sick child a blood transfusion without proper medical supervision, Bach admits that her blog post omitted the presence of a nurse in the room because, “At the time, I wrote in the blog in a really first-person manner.” Jesus counseled his followers to do good deeds in secret, but Bach contends that putting herself out front was good for appealing to donors, which in turn was good for her cause. Her supporters connected with the idea of her doing the lord’s work more than the work itself; even after Bach returned to the United States and Serving His Children’s leadership was taken over by Ugandans, donations never recovered. Growing up in Uganda, says No White Saviors’ Alaso, she got the idea that white missionaries were “more blessed than us, because they looked like the Jesus on the wall.” Charity clusters around recognizable forms and familiar stories, the image of a woman with her hands spread and eyes closed, channeling God’s will through the kind of vessel he always seems to choose.