E's Reviews: Lords of Chaos

TRUE NORWEGIAN BLACK METAL!!!!!!!!!...and murder...

LORDS OF CHAOS was directed by Jonas Åkerlund and stars Rory Culkin and Emory Cohen and is a biopic and takes place in 1987 Oslo, where 17-year-old Euronymous becomes fixated on creating "true Norwegian black metal" with his band Mayhem. He mounts shocking publicity stunts to put the band's name on the map, but the lines between show and reality begin to blur. Just to put this out there, this is sort of a docudrama...that starts out sort of silly and then...well...let's just get to the things I noticed about this film...

To start, let's talk about the bad...the editing in this film kind of took me out of it briefly, with strange jump cuts to the future, thus making the flow of the film feel awkward at times. We see Euronymous at 17, then 18, 19, 20, etc. but without anything happening in between really, just the highlights of his career. Also, the film is being marketed as a "true story, mostly" and that also kind of bugged me. I mean, how can we really know anything from Euronymous' perspective, when the man is dead? I guess you could make the argument that you can kind of "guess" because of the people around him, listening to their stories, including Varg's stories of what went down, but there's no real way to know for sure unless you can conjure the dead...I mean...we could...uh...yeah, I'm not going to do that, not for a movie review at least. Some of the characters (real life members of Mayhem) didn't even get that much screen time. Other people aren't even named...this movie definitely was made for fans of the band, and those who did their homework on the movement (like I did) would know who everyone was, but those just jumping in wouldn't know Jack from Sally.

The things I did like were particularly the acting. The cast is great, and Rory Culkin and Emory Cohen brought about a new level of tension and seething hatred that the black metal Gods of Norway would be proud of. Another performance that stood out for me was Jack Kilmer's portrayal of frontman, Dead. He was downright disturbing to watch on screen, and knowing what happened to him in real life, it hit me hard when we got to those parts of the film. There were some other moments (murders and church burnings) that really did shock me. I had read and watch documentaries about this, but to see it in a film really did something that got under my skin. The murders in particular looked very realistic. The amount of violence and blood that you see really does catch you off guard, because you see this film that starts off feeling like a dark comedy, but ends up becoming something so violent and disturbing, that it makes you really take what happened back then seriously. There was also some very interesting dream sequences that got me to jump a few times, as they were quite dark. The scenery of Norway...when they were shown...like the Fjords and the lakes, forests, etc. was quite gorgeous, and I wish they had shown more of it.

In the end, this was a deeply shocking and disturbing film for me. I loved the cast, the music was hard and fast, and the violence was almost too real for me. And man...black metal artists are really messed up...

Final Score: 8/10