Film Review - Lords of Chaos

Film Review: Lords of Chaos

This review has to, really, start with a disclaimer - I don't get on well with biopics. There's been plenty of amazing real life stories that when recreated within the lense of a film camera that have seemed to fall flat. Maybe it's the fact that Hollywood biopics present a fictionalised version of a real event within the auspices of it being a real story, whilst also looking and feeling like a fictional story? Structurally, biopics always seem to have an uneven relationship with narrative structure; they want to engage us on a level we're familiar with whilst presenting life in all of its amorphousness.

Jonas Åkerlund's Lords of Chaos suffers from some order of that same structual awkwardness. The movie follows Oystein "Euronymous" Aarseth, founde of the infamous Norweigan black metal band Mayhem. Starting with their inception in the mid-80s, we see Mayhem's gradual rise into a music scene obsessed with a theatrical form of "darkness" - showmanship that evokes satanism and paganism in the form that it is demonised by Christianity. Quickly, however, Euronymous's rhetoric pushes the band into a situation that spirals out of control.

At its outset, Lords of Chaos presents itself as a movie "based on the facts, the fiction...and what really happened", which is a rather neat way of skirting around the fact that it does not, in fact, know exactly wants to be. When we first meet Euronymous, he's goofing around with his friends whilst a chipper indie-comedy style voice narrates the story. In an upbeat tone, he warns us that the story will "end badly".

The core of the movie is predicated on Euronymous's relationship with two other members of the band Per "Dead" Ohlin and Kristian "Varg" Vikernes: Dead in the earlier half of the movie, whilst Varg taking up the bulk of the latter part. In the part focusing on Dead and Euronymous, there's a youthfulness and carefreeness to the story, as well as the choppy structure associated with biopics wherein they try to capture events in a filmic way that don't have a natural narrative structure. In one pivotal scene, Dead demands that Euronymous shoots him in the head whilst they're hunting a cat in the woods. Åkerlund's light touch makes it difficult exactly to parse what is really happening in this scene - is it funny, serious, intense or just really strange? Is Dead playing into his cultivated persona or is he pushing Euronymous or does he genuinely want to be shot? It's ambiguous in the wrong ways.

And yet, it sort of works. In a running motif throughout, we often see characters watching The Evil Dead, specifically many of its most gory moments. In Evil Dead, and such, the cartoonish and garish violence happens after a build-up, with a flourish; not so with early parts of Lord of Chaos. What are ostensibly genuine horror set-pieces are sprung upon you with a lightness and lack of build-up that make them strange and fascinating. Dead himself is a very strange character, lacking any real narrative arc or easy classification within traditional character archetypes. It's a strange and compelling.

In the latter part of the movie Euronymous and Varg take the centre stage, and it feels more like the movie gets a shape and coherent narrative drive. Anyone familiar with the real life story knows exactly where it is heading, and even if you don't the movie isn't interested in playing it as some sort of mystery. Instead, tension is caused by the inevitability of events that play out.

There's still an ambivalence around exactly what the movie is trying to be, but it is less successful because it feels like Åkerlund knows what he wants the movie to be, but doesn't quite get there. Part of the problem is that both Euronymous and Varg are archetypes in the way that Dead never was, and the result is just broadly less interesting.

One of the stranger decisions made is that the broadest theme of the work is friendship - Rory Culkin plays the part of Euronymous with a sensitivity and vulnerability throughout, seemingly at odds with what the script is actually doing; it fits strangely with his role as a cult leader, possessing a strange almost goblin-esque charisma.  Emory Cohen makes a convincing nerdy fan and a far less convincing violent sociopath. Neither Dead nor Varg have relationships that get enough time to breath for us to properly feel invested in them, and yet many of the major character beats Euronymous has later on is predicated on that idea. After a point the prevailing feeling of the movie is that these are just a bunch of geeks and misfits in over their head. The movie never takes what they are doing particularly seriously, and is far more concerned with humanising them in, frankly, one of the less interesting ways.

As mentioned earlier, this movie is a genre blender of sorts. When what are ostensibly horror set-pieces pop up, they are visceral and often enjoyable in an almost cartoonish manner. At the most basic level, Åkerlund delivers a lot of the tropes that are part and parcel of both genres without the film ever collapsing in on itself and just outright not working. It's not an expert tightrope walk, but he never falls off either.

It is perhaps apropos that this review is sort of as confused as the movie - this is an entertaining and interesting movie. At worst, it's an engaging way to introduce yourself to the genuinely interesting real life events. Also the music is dece'.