Lords of Chaos

Lords of Chaos

Release Date - 02/08/2019

Country of Origin - Sweeden

Directed by Jonas Åkerlund

Starring - Rory Culken, Emory Cohen, Sky Ferreira, Jack Kilmer, and Valter Skarsgård

Rarely do I not look entirely forward to seeing a movie. If I see a trailer for something I do not like then that is a movie I do not watch. Why waste the money on something I know from a preview that I will not enjoy. That’s the point of trailers after all. Give you a glimpse of what the film will be like for you to decide if you want to see it or not. But sometimes it can be different. For example, a few years ago a friend and I went to see Gods of Egypt simply because the trailers looked so bad we just knew we’d have a good time making fun of it, which we did. Point being even if a film does not look appealing, you occasionally want to watch one of those just to see what it’s like.

I found myself in a strange situation like that with today’s subject Lords of Chaos. The movie is based on a book of the same name which details the history of Norwegian Black Metal in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Infamously the book is (supposedly, I have not read the book and have not had a desire to based on the following statement) pretty much hot garbage in regards to relaying the history of the scene and of what may or may not have happened. However it is (to the best as I can recall) the most known book on the subject. And with a genre as intriguing and controversial it makes sense that at some point a movie would be made on the material. Yet from trailer one the movie just felt off. Could be because Vice has a hand in making it, could be the very slick Hollywood aesthetic the film has, it could be the many tone issues, could be the inaccuracies. But even though from the first moments footage and photographs were being made public I just had the gut feeling I would dislike the film and for quite a while held strong onto my decision to not watch it.

Nether the less I was entranced with the film and finally decided to try and find a showing. The results were not successful and such was my curiosity to see the flick that I bought it outright on Amazon Prime video. Well one viewing later and here we are. So how about that review?

Synopsis

While the book focuses on an overview of Norwegian Black Metal, the film’s plot centers specifically around guitarist/and a founding member of Mayhem Øystein Aarseth A.K.A. Euronymous. Since the plot is based on a lot of information many fans know this plot synopsis won’t be super long. As you can expect we follow his life from when the bands begins (oddly enough though we are never shown exactly how Mayhem formed, we just start with them as a band and Deathcrush having been released) to his death in 1993. Covered topics including the best known era of the band which saw Per Yngve Ohlin A.KA. Dead on vocals, Øystein’s partnership with Varg Vikernes, and the general speed bullet points of the genre. The ups, the downs, the truths, the lies (and oh boy is there one major lie here), it is mostly all covered here.

Critique

As one might have guessed from the opening paragraphs, I could honestly tell from the first few trailers that this was going to be a movie with several issues, and sadly those issues weren’t just a figment of my imagination. The trailer though is a good breaking off point since it shows off the clear major issue of the film. So let’s dive in.

Before the major problem we’ll discuss some other points of the flick. First up is the acting which ties in to one of my major issues; it’s all over the place. A lot of the acting in the movie is pretty flat and at times comes off as very awkward. Now to be fair some of the performances at times aren’t terrible. Despite his mostly monotone delivery, Rory Culkin’s acting at times is pretty good, especially the scenes dealing with him discovering the dead body of Pelle and what happens afterwards. Heck Emory Cohen at times as Varg is fairly menacing (as menacing as Varg could be). However the majority of the performances are pretty lackluster, and while I can’t fully get too nitpicky about the performers not looking like the actual people, nobody here comes even remotely close to their real life counterpart (only the actor playing Atilla Csihar comes close, and that’s because it is his son playing him). I should also state that looking up the casting for the film reveals that some of the other major players in the scene are accounted for, but are never really called out in the movie (I was especially surprised to see that an actor was credited as playing Fenriz). Overall the acting has moments of goodness, but is otherwise pretty lackluster and forgettable.

Also rather meh in execution is the musical aspect of the movie. The original score pieces actually aren’t entirely, they are simply too far and few between to really be noticed. But in all fairness the movie uses this to it’s’ advantage. What I’m sure you all want to know about is how well do reproductions of the iconic songs go. Sadly this is where the film drops the ball rather hard. Now going into this I was aware that some bands didn’t fully give a lot of permission to use their music, as such you only really get to hear Mayhem songs, and only a few at that in very weird shortened versions. Honestly when Freezing Moon finally popped up the abridgedness of it took me by surprise and the way the movie is edited it sort of transformed into just random music (I at least think that it is suppose to transition to Buried by Time and Dust). There are also some official songs in the movie as well from bands like Sodom, but they are the only band I can actually identify. Overall the music is very low key. Not a lot of official songs and what is used is very abrupt (I tried really hard to make an Abruptum joke but I could not). The originally composed music isn’t terrible, and at times its sparseness is rather effective, yet even then it isn’t anything especially special. I suppose you could say this all fits the black metal ideals, but it isn’t exactly helping the movie all that much.

The time has come though for the biggest issue, I feel, of the entire film; the tone. Now I will be honest, I was not expecting a play it straight totally serious film about black metal. No, this scene was filled with some outright hilarity and stupidity that a lot of the surviving members will point out, and to the credit of the movie it does not hold back in calling out a lot of that. Yet there is a serious tonal problem in the flick. Starting with the humor, it’s just childish and awkward. The actors deliver the lines just so weirdly and they don’t sound all that into them. This becomes even more of a sore thumb when these scenes come before or occasionally after a really hard hitting scene for either dramatic on horrorfic circumstances. We have scenes of the various band members just acting like kids before a scene in which Faust brutally murders a man (this is arguably one of if not the best scene/s in the film). As our leads are talking about hailing Satan and how they should spread their evil, we also have Euronymous lamenting the fact that Varg apparently bagged more girls than Gene Simmons or anybody from the hair metal scene, and we see him having said apparent boinking sessions. The list of tonal whiplashed shifts like this goes on and on, and while this is a “biographical” film which means we will be shown various ways the person and other people act, this stuff is just jarring a lot of the time. Heck we get a scene near the end of Euronymous having sex with his kind of girlfriend (a person who as far as I have ever heard may or may not have existed according to various scene members) and follow that up with a weird vision quest thing of him being haunted by Pelle’s corpse. Shit is bonkers.

However, however, if you need any more proof of how odd this film’s tone is, I only need one scene. That is the scene that I bet everyone watching this movie was at least some form of apprehensive about; Pelle’s suicide. I was nervous from the word go for this scene. How much are they going to show, will we see his note (which from what is shown of it is inaccurate), just what will the scene be like? To the credit of the team behind the movie and Pelle’s actor, the scene is not bad. You for the first time feel the pain and anguish of Dead harming himself (as one may expect this is (arguably) the most gut wrenchingly graphic scene in the film, the first slit of the wrists especially is hard to watch). This entirely scene is just hard to watch for the right reasons. But, but, it is almost all completely ruined by the fact that the movie keeps cutting to Euronymous at his parents trying to get rid of a house plant he was given and an answering machine message he and Dead made about killing, eating, sacrificing and what have you to little girls. Just…fuck.

Hopefully after this surprisingly long rambling (I kind of said the title) you all can see my weird state of mind during and after watching Lords of Chaos. This film in my opinion could have worked, it really could have worked. Black metal and the Norwegian base in general makes for a fascinating history lesson for heavy metal and could translate well to film in a nonfiction or even fiction form. The film itself at times even goes into critiquing itself/the scene as a whole by calling out a lot of the BSy things the bands would say and do. The editing and cinematography is a little too slick to what I would have pictured, but it strangely works quite a bit. Yet I feel like any good it tries to accomplish is almost completely undone by odd creative decisions. Scenes of high suspense are followed or preceded by fratboy humor by way of trying to be “dark.” Acts of terrible violence having joking in them or just really weird absurd shit (another example of this being that as Varg is killing Euronymous he makes and drinks an entire glass of chocolate milk while Euronymous is trying to escape). I can’t holding the appearances of the actors against the film because, well, you pick who you pick based on talent, but a lot of their performances come off as being phoned in save for a few moments. For a movie about music there isn’t a lot of it, especially for the genre the movie is about and what is there is just so brief it barely registers unless you know these songs going in. Then as I have mentioned many times is the problem with tone. Yes it is okay for a film to go in between tones, but to whiplash between them so much just creates problems.

Really at the end of the day this is a movie I can’t say I regret buying or watching. I love black metal and to have a non documentary film about it is pretty cool. It also wasn’t the overblown Vice hipster shitfest I was afraid it would be, which is always good. Yet I can’t say that it is something I’ll watch a whole lot or even buy again should it get a physical release here in the States. I can only recommend the movie to fans of black metal, especially Norwegian black metal. But be prepared to have a very odd, confusing, and semi-fun watch.