Lords of Chaos

It quickly becomes clear that Akerlund was hell-bent on underscoring the lameness of these teenagers, regardless of the atrocities. With the controversy surrounding the film and Varg/Mayhem's refusal to participate or licence their music, you have to wonder if it was a little personal for the director. Certainly more could have been done to convey the transcendental power of Burzum's music. It's still a story worth telling, and some of the darker moments are pretty hard to digest.

Does a good job balancing on different sides of the legends. Well directed and acted.

I liked Åkerlund's music videos, so I was interested to see how he'd take this on. It's a strange film. There isn't much attention given to why these eejits did the terrible things they did, and some of the script and characterisation was lacking; Varg in particular just didn't come across as a convincing human being. Maybe that was the point? It's punctuated with some rather nasty moments of violence; this does give the film some edge and tension. Spinal Tap this is not. Interesting.

Great documentary about a scene I was heavily into more than a decade ago when I was younger and edgier. As a documentary, it's rather good and quite accurate. As an art piece, it does a good effort making the characters look like pieces of shit, but also makes them a bit too relatable. Varg should not be portrayed like an introverted guys trying his hardest to look cool in his twisted way, he was just a raw piece of shit. Same thing in a lesser way with Faust and Euronymous.

Not exactly a psychologically insightful film, so this simple biopic is merely an account of these events and they do add up to a compelling story. Some of the filmmaking is just too try-hard, but there's a closeness with this material, namely the disturbed nature of these characters and the very brutal and very real violence that emerges from them.

Does a great job showing a scary culture and a bunch of horrific events as the work of a bunch of lame dumb kids trying their hardest to fit in and be cool.

In itself it's a movie that portrays young people that are pictured as immature, naive, that want to look cool. The characters are charicatures of young naive people, which, by itself, makes the movie lose credibility. On the other hand, it's a fictitious portrayal of the early 90's norwegian black metal scene and its most tragic moments. And it's definitely an unfair and actually irreponsible portrayal of the people involved, the facts, their intentions, the representation is far from reality.

The voiceover is often grating and the film doesn't always know which tone to strike or how much it wants to ridicule its central characters (not that they don't deserve it), but it still has plenty of effective scenes and some good performances. Its portrayal of slow radicalization through a series of escalating boasts and "jokes" up to very real, horrifying crimes is quite effective and disturbingly relevant in today's world.

the fact that varg hates the movie is enough for me to love it. I like the tone it sets and the way it doesn't really take them seriously, as a well-deserved opposite from the way these spoiled middle-class brats perceived themselves. my one gripe would be the way euronymous almost comes off as sympathetic.

I don't know much about the subject matter but this movie made want to search out more about the Black Metal scene in Norway. There are some truly hard to watch moments in the film. The audience is given just enough material for them to feel something for the main character but also not enough to fully release him from his part in the events that took place. The acting in this movie is superb. I do wish they would have used some Norwegian during the movie but it's a choice.

As idiotic and terrible as these people seem here, they are/were actually worse in real life from what little i've seen and read. Still it could make for an entertaining movie, but it's... not especially. Did like how Åkerlund went out of his way to mess with that clown Varg Vikernes tho.

B

Probably best watching "Pure Fucking Mayhem" the documentary instead. This was like watching the "Social Network" turned goth.

this is guilty of the "poseurdom" it heavyhandedly lampoons (the ugly commercial sheen of the visuals may accidentally be its best ironic joke), eschewing any coherent perspective or genuine insight in its pandering to normies and gorehounds alike. i'm unsurprised and glad they didn't get the rights to any 2nd wave stuff (mayhem aside), although it's only the presence of sarcofago, tormentor, holy terror, a-ha, grotesque (m)et al that keeps it watchable. man, i wish sono stayed on board.

Sensationalist and more concerned with the infamous violence and crimes than the music. Most of all it's just redundant. Anybody who's interested has already heard the story dozens of times, probably told better. https://letterboxd.com/pickle_man2135/film/lords-of-chaos/

It's ok. It tells the story with all the fucked up shit everyone knows about and therefore it lacks focus.

Varg is cast as a fat jewish boy and the entire movie feels like a cheap hitpiece on him and nothing more. Produced in part by Vice, so I'm not really sure what I was expecting. Everything and everyone is reduced to easily palatable Hollywood-friendly caricatures, historical accuracy be damned. Dead is basically Sean from SLC Punk, but suicidal and hangs cats. Euronymous is a very likable, good-hearted young man who just wants to be friends. Varg is fat and jewish and cannot stop fucking. Dumb.

This movie is all over the place. The uneven tone, the kindergarten level script, the absurd casting. Cohen could not be less like Varg, he looks more like a young Bobcat Goldthwaite and the film does come off as something of a lazy hitpiece on Varg. If you want to watch something goofy and not take it seriously, you might enjoy it but I couldn't recommend it.

Truly masterclass acting by Cohen. His Varg spans the gamut of nerdy awkward metalhead teen to full-on psychopath. Jack Kilmer does a decent job as Dead, showcasing the ethereal, otherworldly nature of the singer. And Rory Culkin isn't too bad as Euronymous either. But all in all, the film prefers the trees for the forest. It sticks to the details and manages to incorporate pretty much every rumor and hearsay as a means of staying true to the subject... at the expense of a broader narrative.

A pretty embarrassing movie. Complete mess. Some moments are so eye-rollingly bad that they become funny but for a movie about Black Metal, this movie seems to be devoid of music. Could it be that all Norwegian BM bands wanted to stay far away from this movie to begin with?

Mostly bad execution of an interesting story. Hopefully, someone will give this another try. Better casting and acting performances will be needed. When I think of Euronymous the last thing I think of is a Johnny Depp impersonating Hunter Thompson--it's an odd choice to say the least. The film has some entertainment value but it's harder to enjoy if you're familiar with the story. It gets a lot right with the character dynamics but the artistic liberty ventures into the unforgivably absurd.

A True Norwegian Mixed Bag. It's not horribly made and the acting usually isn't bad minus the guy who plays Varg (who also doesn't convince me at all/looks nothing like him) but the rest of the movie is basically a by the numbers, bland retelling that fails to capture a lot of what made most of this stuff so interesting/disturbing in the first place. There is also a plethora of unintentional laughs throughout. A lot of what happened is worse than this suggests. It's watchable though.