2018’s Lords of Chaos features one of the most disturbing scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie.
Jack Kilmer plays Pelle Ohlin, a Swedish singer who was horribly abused as a child—beaten so badly his spleen ruptured and he was clinically dead for a few minutes before they brought him back. He grew up obsessed with death, sometimes seeming to believe he already was dead. He took Dead as his stage name and became the lead singer of the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem. He’d found a following, but it didn’t seem to matter. Left alone in his attic bedroom, Dead takes a knife and slits his wrists in close-up. After staring at the blood running down his arms, he uses the same knife to slit his throat. That still doesn’t kill him. Even while he’s coughing up blood he finds the strength to write a note apologizing for the mess. Then he sits on the bed, puts the barrel of a shotgun to his forehead, and pulls the trigger. We see all of it. The gore effects are disturbingly real, and Kilmer’s performance captures the eerie detachment of someone too fascinated by death to care that he’s the one dying. It’s not an easy scene to watch.
What’s even more disturbing is the reaction of Dead’s “friend,” Euronymous (Rory Culkin). The founder and lead guitarist of Mayhem is the one who discovers the body. Instead of calling an ambulance, he drives to a store, buys a disposable camera, and takes pictures. Later he hands out necklaces he claims were made from fragments of Dead’s skull. He uses the notoriety of the suicide to launch a record label and brand Mayhem as the world’s most evil band.
After Dead’s death, Euronymous is approached by Varg Vikernes (Emory Cohen), a fan he’d once cruelly dismissed. Varg has remade himself as a neo-Nazi pagan musician. When Euronymous agrees to produce Varg’s debut album, Varg celebrates by burning down a church. Soon he’s on a church-burning spree. Meanwhile another of Varg’s acquaintances, Faust (Valter Skarsgård), brutally murders a gay man in a park. Euronymous, who built his fame on songs about death and destruction, suddenly finds himself surrounded by people who are actually killing and destroying. Eventually they come for him too.
I should state right now that I’m hardly an expert on Norwegian black metal. It’s not my kind of music. I’ve read a little about the murder of Euronymous and Varg Vikernes’s subsequent career, but I’m in no position to judge how accurate the film is. Plenty of people online were critical of the way it chose to tell the story. Having watched it, I don’t feel it gave me any real insight into what the black metal scene was actually about. If anything, it portrays Euronymous as something of a poseur. Toward the end he tells Varg the whole thing was just an act. Varg doesn’t take it well.
In real life Varg Vikernes served 15 years for the church burnings and the murder of Euronymous. During the COVID years he made a few comments critical of the lockdowns and of “wokeness.” I remember a fellow film critic (someone who’s never written for this site, I should add) was incredibly impressed and started telling everyone they needed to read him. A few of us pointed out that Vikernes was not only a convicted murderer but a neo-Nazi who hated America and was the last person she should be embracing, lockdown opinions or not. For weeks she refused to believe it. Eventually someone told her to read his Wikipedia page and she never mentioned him again.
As for the film itself, it does a good job of capturing the rebellion and directionless anger that could pull someone toward a band like Mayhem. Rory Culkin is strong as Euronymous, smug and arrogant at the start and learning a little humility only when it’s far too late. Emory Cohen has a few effective moments as Varg, but there are also stretches where the character and Cohen’s performance just comes across as being .… well, goofy. Director Jonas Akerlund may have started as a drummer for a black metal band but the film leaves you with the feeling that he doesn’t care much for the scene or have much use for the people who populate it and it’s difficult to get emotionally involved with a film that doesn’t seem to really care about its characters. It’s a well-made and at times disturbingly graphic film, but in the end it never quite convinces the uninitiated that they should care about this story.
