On the escape route from North Korea, as seen in Beyond Utopia (Roadside Attractions)

Paranoid, impoverished, and determined to make its inhabitants’ lives hell on earth, North Korea is a nation where would-be escapees lay everything on the line to get out. But escaping is a nearly insurmountable hardship. Today fugitives face increasingly challenging conditions on the ground. They also have to overcome mental barriers holding them back. Madeleine Gavin’s documentary Beyond Utopia takes a while to fall into place, but it probably gives viewers the most complete—and harrowing—picture of the nightmare involved in fleeing North Korea.

Gavin’s film cuts back and forth between multiple scenarios. It recounts the complicated history of the Hermit Kingdom and its rulers; focuses on Seungeun Kim, a pastor who helps guide families out of North Korea; allows escapees to tell their stories of life under the regime; and most scarily, follows two families on their own dangerous journeys to freedom—freedom hoped for but not always achieved.

Escapees tell stories of starvation, beatings, and being forced to steal neighbors’ outhouse excrement to meet their tax payments to the government. North Koreans are compelled to worship their dynastic leaders as gods, sing their praises, and ignore the horrors they see. In the words of defector Gwang Il Jung, “They want people to be deaf and blind.” North Korea expert Barbara Demick explains how dynasty founder Kim Il Sung adapted methods from evangelical Christianity to manipulate his subjects. Today, the cellphone revolution that has swept even the poorest sections of the globe has passed North Korea by. Cut off from communication, many North Koreans have come to believe they are living in paradise, and struggle to shed that illusion after even escaping and being exposed to gentler, more rational ways of life.

Pastor Kim recounts his experiences shepherding North Korean defectors out of the regime’s clutches. He has suffered a broken neck in a river crossing, but still keeps a smile on his face; he met and married his wife after helping her over the border. He reports that China, once an important intermediate stop on a defector’s journey, now shuns and even hunts North Koreans as part of a tightened security structure.

It is the task of getting around heightened barriers that affords the film’s most gripping stories. Gavin follows Soyeon Lee, an escapee trying to get her teenage son out of North Korea. Her story is heartbreaking, and like many, involves terrible survivor guilt. Another storyline follows the multigenerational Roh family as they undertake a terrifying escape by car and by foot through Laos to Thailand. Night cameras capture their furtive undercover flight. It is suspenseful, but more devastating is the aftermath: disorientation, bewilderment, and for the older family members, an awareness of opportunities lost.

At a time of global turmoil, Beyond Utopia gives us a bracing sense of the real risks and costs of freedom. It’s powerful filmmaking with an impact that lasts.