LORDS OF CHAOS
Death metal…
The Norwegian black metal movie you have to see.
Has any musical genre been more thoroughly lampooned by cinema than metal? Thanks to the pervading impact of This Is Spinal Tap, give a character black hair and a Slayer shirt and you might rightly expect chuckles before guitar riffs. Lords Of Chaos, Jonas Åkerlund’s film about Norwegian black-metal pioneers Mayhem, may be laden with dark humour, but the true story it tells is anything but a joke.
Åkerlund is a filmmaker with serious credibility in the field. He was briefly the drummer for Swedish black metal band Bathory, and he went on to direct music videos for Rammstein, Metallica and The Prodigy. But adapting the titular true-crime book, Åkerlund’s focus isn’t the music – he’s even enlisted Sigur Rós to provide a counterintuitive score – but the small group of twentysomethings who went from musical innovators to urban terrorists, before their aimless rage inevitably turned inwards.
Rory Culkin (Signs, Mean Creek) stars as Øystein Aarseth, aka Euronymous, a founding member of Mayhem and the film’s narrator. In looking for a new lead singer, Euronymous meets Dead (Jack Kilmer), a vocalist obsessed with mortality. The writing’s on the wall the moment we meet him, and soon his brains are too, when Dead kills himself in shockingly graphic fashion. Euronymous discovers the body, but instead of calling the cops, he buys a disposable camera and recovers a few ‘keepsakes’, even using a picture of the twisted tableau on an album cover.
Now infamous, Euronymous moves to Oslo and opens a record store. There he reconnects with Kristian Vikernes, aka Varg (Emory Cohen), a ‘poseur’ fanboy he once dismissed for having a Scorpions patch on his jacket. Spellbound by Euronymous’ demonisation of Christianity, Varg takes his idol’s flippant suggestion to burn down a church to heart, and makes headline news with his act of arson. It proves the starting pistol for an increasingly unhinged game of oneupmanship among the ‘Black Circle’ of friends that quickly turns bloody.
Shock rock
When it comes to the red stuff, Lords Of Chaos doesn’t hold back. Its debut at Sundance 2018 sparked controversy, while the BBFC consulted suicide prevention experts before approving the film’s 18 certificate. Later murders are shot in an unvarnished, agonisingly prolonged fashion that makes them almost uncomfortably believable. Despite cheeky nods to Braindead and The Evil Dead, these scenes aren’t exploitative; they illustrate just how far beyond redemption the Black Circle quickly went. There’s a senseless tragedy to the fact these boys are brainwashed by their own bravado and ill-defined ideology. When Euronymous eventually steps over the line, it’s not because of some deep-felt conviction, but because he can’t be seen to lose face.
Åkerlund knows this is ridiculous, and constantly highlights the contrast between the privileged lives the band lead (Euronymous’ store is bankrolled
‘thiS iS an illuminating anD upSetting Cautionary tale’
by his loving father) and their infatuation with all things evil. Before one character commits the film’s most heinous act – the vicious murder of a gay man – we see him cheerfully tell his mum he’s going out for the evening. The tonal whiplash of this can be felt a little too acutely at times, but it manages to be both amusingly ludicrous and fascinatingly grim.
Back to Black
Set in the late ’80s/early ’90s, Lords is shot with grubby, period-authentic grain, almost like some lost treasure from the video-nasty era. Åkerlund doesn’t let his music video background intrude on his story, either, with just a couple of effectively disorientating dream sequences making full use of deliriously quick cuts to assault the senses. In a curious case of art feeding into art, Åkerlund shot the video for Metallica’s ‘ManUNkind’ while shooting Lords Of Chaos in late 2016, with Culkin et al playing their characters from the film.
That cast, which also includes Cohen and another Skarsgård brother, are an authentic-looking bunch, but the distinctly non-European accents jar. By the end, it’s hard not to care deeply about Culkin’s Euronymous, who we see early doors dyeing his hair with his little sister, and whose humanity the film never loses touch with. Cohen, however, struggles with Varg’s accelerated spiral into homicidal psychosis – the screenplay building him up as the looming threat while continually painting him the fool.
It’s certainly not a film everyone will be able to stomach. And the script, which purports to be based on “truth… lies… and what actually happened”, has taken liberties which may irk those intimately familiar with Norwegian black metal. But for anyone new to Mayhem, this is an illuminating and upsetting cautionary tale. Keep a copy of Spinal Tap to hand, you’ll need a good laugh after. Jordan Farley
tHe VerdiCt
The tragic origins of Norwegian black metal make for an unsettling insight into a controversial subculture.