Lords of Chaos makes me channel my inner John Cusack as I wonder, do Norwegians listen to black metal because they are miserable, or are they miserable because they listen to black metal? As for me, I know I was miserable because I was watching this movie.
Lords of Chaos is a semi-fictional (though ‘barely-factual’ might be a better description) account of the Norwegian black metal scene of the early 1990s, told from the perspective of seminal band Mayhem co-founder Euronymous (Rory Culkin). The film is directed and co-written by a Swede (Jonas Åkerlund), set in Oslo, has Norwegian characters supposedly based on real Norwegian people, and deals with a type of music that is to Oslo what grunge is to Seattle – so of course all the main characters, who have names like Pelle Ohlin or Jan Axel Blomberg, are played by American actors speaking fluent English with American accents.
Now, Mayhem’s song are typically written in English, but reading their lyrics – and they have to be read, since listening to them being sung is like hearing some Cthulhuian chant – only highlights the songwriters' poor command of that language; consider these verses from “Funeral Fog”: “Every time this year, this dark fog will appear/Up from the tombs it comes to take one more life that can be near/In the middle of Transylvania, all natural life has for a long time ago gone/It's thin and so beautiful but also so dark and mysterious.” The movie certainly would have been a hell of a lot funnier if the characters actually spoke like that.
The script itself is as ineptly written as the band’s songs. To mention just one example, we are told that a certain character hates cats more than anything else, as if the dead feline hanging from the ceiling weren’t enough indication (or did Åkerlund by any chance feel we might misconstrue the latter as an act of love?).
The worst of all, however, is the inexplicable and implausible watering down of Euronymous’s persona; are we really meant to believe that, after finding the body of his lead singer – who has just shotgun-blasted his own head to bits after slicing his neck and wrists open –, rearranging the crime scene, and taking Polaroids of the gruesome spectacle – one of which found its way to the cover of a Mayhem bootleg live album – (all more or less well documented facts), Euronymous then knelt down and shed bitter tears over his poor dead ‘friend’? Similarly, the shards of leftover cranium with which Euronymous fashioned necklaces become in the movie chicken bones.
This bowdlerization serves little purpose, and Euronymous and rest of his black metal brethren all come across as contemptible, vain, and shallow individuals – which, by all accounts, is a faithful depiction of their real-life counterparts; the question is, then, why would we want to spend almost two hours in such a deadening company?