Even though his ascension to absolute rule was accomplished without any democratic process, it seems at the beginning of “Without the King,” a new documentary by Michael Skolnik, that the people of Swaziland couldn’t have chosen a more personable and reassuring figurehead than King Mswati III.

Swaziland’s absolute monarch, the only such personage still ruling on the African continent, is shown delivering his first state address upon his coronation in 1986 at age 18. “I’ve never made a speech in front of a big gathering,” he tells his assembled subjects. With a level gaze and easy smile, dressed in native garb, he cuts a storybook figure of benevolent leadership. Twenty years later and now augmenting his wardrobe with hand-tailored designer suits, King Mswati is equally personable and ingratiating while making state visits abroad and holding forth on camera about the problems and challenges of bringing his tiny West African fiefdom into the new millennium.

But via a series of increasingly critical sound bites culled from broadcast media, interviews with Swaziland’s citizenry, and repeated visits with the king’s eldest daughter, Princess Sikhanyiso, as she travels to America to attend a Bible college in California, a less personality-driven and more personally appalling portrait of Swaziland’s past and present emerges.

While King Mswati, his 14 wives, and his 22 children enjoy the benefits of conspicuous consumption on a royal scale, the rest of the country’s citizens have a life expectancy of 31 years (the planet’s lowest) and suffer from an AIDS and HIV prevalence rate of 42.6% (the planet’s highest). The film offers a chilling grave’s-eye view of horrific municipal mismanagement perpetrated by a monarch who leaves arable land unirrigated and orphaned children to be fed and cared for only through the agencies of the United Nations and foreign charities. Meanwhile, he cultivates a powerless token parliament, takes additional wives, and purchases jets and limos.

The king’s insistence on upholding venerable tribal customs at the expense of modernization is revealed to be a social perversion allowing tyranny, ignorance, and cruelty. “The mind fractures at the thought of it,” one U.N. health advocate says. Footage of Swazi citizens preparing meals of offal scavenged from landfills and slaking their thirst from fetid, muddy ponds takes its toll in “Without the King,” and as the film examines the grotesque disparity in wealth between ruler and ruled, the heart starts to crack, too.

But U.N. observers and film viewers, like the members of the royal family themselves, can afford the luxury of sentiment. King Mswati’s subjects, however, cannot, and among the bracing nonfiction disclosures that “Without the King” makes is precisely where terrorists and freedom fighters come from and just how narrow the semantic line is between the two. “I don’t want to die for the struggle,” says one emaciated would-be assassin. “I want to kill for the struggle.” Nearing the end of the approximately three decades that he’ll remain alive, the man has literally nothing to lose either way.

“Without the King,” which opens today at Quad Cinemas, so doggedly travels back and forth among the palace, the princess’s pampered lifestyle abroad (and glimpsed glimmers of a dawning social consciousness when she returns home), damning statistics, condemnatory testimonials, and unflinching depictions of squalor and oppression, that even at a comparatively brisk 84 minutes, it is still something of a workout. The hypocrisy, suffering, and rage fulminating in Swaziland and depicted in “Without the King” are of such medieval proportions that they will, the film suggests, likely boil over in a tragically brutal way before too long.