I’m going to try to write a movie review for a horror film every day this month. It’s been a while since I’ve written anything and it’s been a while since I’ve followed through on anything I said I was going to do, so there’s a pretty good chance I’ll abandon this, like, tomorrow, but for tonight, I’m writing.
Over the weekend, the Alamo in Brooklyn screened several films from this year’s Fantastic Fest. Among the few that I saw was Lord of Chaos, a fictionalized account of the murder of Norwegian black metal Euronymous, of the band Mayhem, by Varg Vikerenes, of the band Burzum. Directed by Jonas Akerlund, himself a member of the metal band Bathory in the 80’s, and now primarily a music video director, Lords of Chaos is a bad movie, and as such I have very mixed feelings about it. I like bad movies, the worse the better. Most days I’d rather watch a good bad movie than a genuinely good movie. Bad movies can be entertaining in their ineptitude, but they can also be challenging and revealing in the same way that art films are. I have respect and even admiration for movies that are bad in certain ways, if there is a sense of true vision behind them, or such an utter front of cynical commercialism, that they wind up having something to say.
I love bad movies and Lords of Chaos is a bad movie, but I did not love Lords of Chaos, and it did not wind up having something to say. It wasn’t boring, and I had fun watching it, and I have to admit, with some awe, that it is the rare bad movie that manages to get just about everything wrong, from its tone to its casting to its narrative structure etc. I know this makes it sound like something worth watching, but the whole film is tempered with such an extreme aura of averageness. Among the first things you seen onscreen in the film is the logo for Vice Media (which immediately elicited laughter from the audience), and if you’re at all familiar with the Vice aesthetic, that pretty much tells you exactly what you’re going to get- an exploitable story, told without depth or insight, punctuated by some sex and violence, a couple of wild house parties, some casual Nazism, a total disinterest in any of the story’s female characters (or, to be more accurate, female character- only one woman has any significant screen time, all the others are glimpsed briefly during montages of Varg having sex, or are the other characters’ mothers, often only heard from offscreen) and a general, all-pervasive smirking smugness.
From the first moments of the film proper, it is clear that the tone is all wrong. The whole story is driven by Euronymous’ voiceover, in a style that very much recalls Goodfellas and its many imitators, and just doesn’t feel right for a film about Norwegian black metal. It would have made sense for the film to try and capture some of the tone of the historical moment it portrays, or if not, then to juxtapose the inconsistently light-hearted tone of the movie against the dark, somber pretentiousness of the metal scene, but the tone of the voiceover seems to be done without any critical intent- it’s just the way Ackerlund seems to feel a movie like this should be made.
The inconsistent, discordant tone might be more forgivable if the film gave us anything of depth to hold onto, but that’s not the case. The characterizations are especially weak, with Rory Culkin’s Euronymous driving the film by charisma alone. Emory Cohen as Varg hints at the resentments and insecurities that might have led him to his crimes, but the film doesn’t offer much to back them up, other than a scene where Culkin makes fun of him for wearing a Scorpions patch. Also hinting at something more, but not given enough screen time to do much with it, is Jack Kilmer as Dead, one of the early members of of Mayhem who helped form the band’s image (and the image of black metal in general), and whose suicide probably would have meant something more in a film where the other characters had more of an emotional life (here, it’s relegated to a few jump scare flashback’s that seem to indicate discovering Death’s body affected Euronymous, though exactly how is not made clear). Most of the other characters are entirely interchangeable, so much so that when one of them, Faust (played by Valter Skarsgard- a lot of famous last names in this one) wanders into town to murder someone, it’s entirely unclear why, and afterwards, how it affected him.
In addition to the glib tone and underdeveloped characters, Lords of Chaos fails to find significance in two of its most fundamental elements- the setting and the music itself. The idea, presumably, of Norwegian black metal is that it couldn’t really come from anywhere other than Norway, that it is drawn from the country’s atmosphere, its history and its temperament in a way other major cultural moments could only originate from a specific time and place. None of this is present in the film, which (admittedly in part of the mix of accents of the actors) could take place almost anywhere, at almost any time- it doesn’t really capture the sense of taking place in the 80s-90s, but feels uncomfortably contemporary (or perhaps more accurately reflects the early 00s heyday of Vice as a masthead of party culture).
Music, meanwhile, feels oddly absent from the film, though we get one fairly strong concert scene early on with a Dead-fronted Mayhem, that quickly devolves into a gross-out scene of self-mutilation. Metal tends to be a music that its fans connect to on a deep, emotional level, and Euronymous was a music nerd to the core, seen in the film going to a Motorhead concert and later relaxing to a Tangerine Dream record, while fronting his own band, record label and record store, yet the film doesn’t seem to care much about the music at all (ironic in a film where the characters are overwhelmingly concerned about “true metal” and who’s a “poser,” Lords of Chaos tries to capture some of the black metal aesthetic without having any real feeling for the music), and as a result, feels ultimately empty. If we don’t care about the characters, or the world in which they exist, or the thing (music) that brought them all together, then why are we watching this movie? What’s the point in telling this story?
And the truth is, in the end, there is no point. It’s a “fucked up” thing that happened, and now there’s a movie about it. I really don’t like to be snarky or hyperbolic about movies I don’t like, so I’m not going to say watching Lords of Chaos was the worst thing that ever happened to me, because it wasn’t, and I can’t even really say I hated it, because I laughed throughout the whole film (a somewhat non-plussed Culkin, who was at the screening, told us afterwards, “We didn’t realize it was funny while we were making it,” suggesting that the laughs were largely unintentional, and making the movie seem even worse- the thought of a movie this camp meant to be taken seriously is almost enough to make me feel little angry about the obliviousness of the filmmakers) and had a long, fun conversation with my friends about it afterwards, which is honestly more than I can say for a lot of movies I liked a lot more than this one, or at least felt had more to offer, but as I sit here now writing about it, thinking about Lords of Chaos makes me feel kind of sad, less about the movie itself than about the world it reflects, the real world, where a murderous neo-Nazi like Varg Vikerenes can attract a cult following and where Vice (itself co-founded by a neo-Nazi, something nobody in the company cared about until it threatened to cost them money) can parlay casual hipster racism and sexism into a multi-million dollar media empire with a more-or-less unchecked culture of sexual harassment, exploiting unpaid labor and contributing a sort of blandly unfounded cynicism to the culture (doing it for the luls, etc.), while managing to displace a wide swath of Brooklyn’s DIY scene in the process. In this respect, I guess Lords of Chaos is truly a film for Trump’s American, loud yet bland and empty, sexist, flirting with Nazism without the courage to admit it, confused about the purpose of its own existence, shallow and kind of fun to watch in a way that makes you feel worse about yourself the next day.
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