Rory Culkin’s ‘Lords Of Chaos’ Will Make You View Black Metal Differently

LORDS OF CHAOS

★★★

In some ways, it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for someone to make a movie about the Norwegian black metal scene in the early ‘90s. This tiny handful of musicians found a global audience of extreme-seeking metalheads and mass-media infamy by delivering both washed-out recordings and drama worthy of Shakespeare, if not soap-opera: youthful rebellion, Satanism, church-burnings, rivalry, murder. The central question of Jonas Åkerlund’s bubblegum portrait thereof — based on a book by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind — is whether black metal’s key figures really believed the myths they were peddling, or whether it was all just marketing.

Lords Of Chaos deliberately obscures the line between the two, effectively framing these kids as spiritual forerunners to the social-media age: more obsessed with branding and image and narrative than actual music, and often wilfully conflating where their personalities end and their adopted personae begin. The film doubles down on this cynicism by playing, broadly, as a comedy; its viewpoint verily signalled by a journalist and photographer, herein, who’ve been contacted to drum up press for the Black Circle’s evil acts. “What a fucking idiot,” they laugh, at a posturing dude who’s essentially just handed them not just a front-page sensation, but a prosecutable confession.

It’s jovially narrated, from beyond the grave, by Rory Culkin, playing Euronymous, the Mayhem mastermind, record-store owner, and label-boss. As the oft-boasting “inventor of true Norwegian black-metal”, he’s the root of it all; and, working on the business side of things, is the embodiment of the notion that all this evil is just a way to sell records. He’s set against his rival, and the man who did him in, Emory Cohen, who’s poorly-cast to play Burzum idealist Varg ‘Count Grishnackh’ Vikernes, whose glorious ambient albums and utterly-horrifying ideological beliefs make most separating-art-from-artist debates seem positively minor-league. He’s the picked-upon little brother, deeply insecure and eager-to-please, who ultimately becomes the most evil of all, out to turn the tables on those older, cooler Mayhem members who once saw him as an innocent kid.

Even though black metal fans know the grisly end that’s coming, Lords Of Chaos paints their boys-own rivalry as absurd, sophomoric, worthy of mockery. The word “poser” is the scene’s ultimate putdown, but it’s the film’s diagnosis of its protagonists: they’re the rich kids getting about in dad’s Volvo, their great Satanic acts essentially just schoolboy sedition; the whole thing seeming very juvenile, very male, very masturbatory. When the pair have a final meeting-of-the-minds — where an ultimately-fatal rupture between the two occurs — it’s over sips of a branded soft-drink. And, so, the whole is a tragicomedy, its unreliable narrator not even allowing any sincerity to take hold even when delivering tragic death.

Befitting the tone, Åkerlund — a longtime high-powered video-clip director, and one-time Bathory drummer — shoots Lords Of Chaos something like an old MTV clip: his camera forever casual, the set-ups sloppy, the whole thing brought together ‘in editing’, meaning it’s just cut after unnecessary cut. There’s not a single great composition or genuinely-cinematic sequence; the direction at least ably conveying that the whole thing is, really, a lark. For most, that won’t matter; this a portrait of a piece of pop-cultural lore that, perhaps, can only truly be told as tragicomedy.

VELVET BUZZSAW

★★★

Of all the inanimate curses to befall a horror-movie’s luckless victims — from dolls (too many to mention) to mists (The Fog), tyres (Rubber), and hair (the Hair segment from Body Bags, the attendant Simpsons parody, and Justin Simien’s upcoming Killer Hair) — none has seemed quite so strange as the accursed object of terror in Velvet Buzzsaw: modern art.

In Dan Gilroy’s third directorial effort, the idea of “dangerous” art is literalised. Velvet Buzzsaw is a nasty genrework of gruesome, glib, guffaw-drawing deaths, but it comes cloaked in an art-world satire. Its greatest satirical moment comes when Toni Collette’s silver-bob’d, air-kissing art ‘advisor’ falls victim to a giant, reflective chrome sphere. As work of art, it’s a genuine eye-of-the-beholder item, its mirrored surfaces casting an ever-shifting, wildly-distorted look at the self and the world around. But, when it becomes cursed, it turns far more murderous, severing a Collette limb and gushing out a slasher-flick’s geysers of comic blood-spray. The real joke comes when, the next day, her dead body and splattered viscera is believed to be a part of the installation, and left there on the gallery floor, the let-in patrons left to nod knowingly at such a shocking work of subversive art.

Velvet Buzzsaw is, itself, never quite shocking or subversive. Satirising the art-world is the comedy equivalent of fish-in-a-barrel-shooting, the shocking amounts of cash/capital/self-importance/pretentiousness all too easy to send up (not to mention that the art-world is already constantly taking the piss out of itself). In poking at this grotesquerie, Gilroy fashions a moral distinction — the creators of art, and those who seek to profit off them — and uses it as the dividing line between those who get to survive and those who, in grand/ridiculous Grudge/Final Destination dispatchings, must die.

The premise is that Zawe Ashton, a put-upon gallery assistant, discovers a cache of fantastical, Goya-esque paintings made by the shut-in, Darger-esque obsessive who lived upstairs. The late artist left behind instructions that all his vast artistic output be destroyed; but, the discovery of a dead, neo-mythical outsider-artist has art-world vultures seeing only dollar-signs, greed that portends their imminent demise.

Like Gilroy’s prior two pictures, then, Velvet Buzzsaw is a morality play set against the immoral sprawl of Los Angeles. In Nightcrawler, Jake Gyllenhaal’s ambitious, rapacious anti-hero is a ‘stringer’, chasing after violent crime scenes with camera in tow, ready to trample all lines of ethics to get his footage. In Roman J. Israel, Esq., these morals are inverted: Denzel Washington playing an aging, socially-inept lawyer so beholden to his own personal codes of ethics that he’s constantly sabotaging prospects for career/financial advancement. After these studies of singular characters, Velvet Buzzsaw casts a wider net, and uses a broader tone, delivering a host of colourful caricatures orbiting in an insular, insane art-world.

Gyllenhaal reunites with Gilroy, delivering another great performance in a career suddenly feeling full of them. He plays a disproportionately — and implausibly — influential art critic; a mercurial, bespectacled bisexual who solemnly opines “critique is so limiting and emotionally draining”, but later proceeds to critique a funeral for its tacky setting and ugly coffin. It’s the funeral of Tom Sturridge’s South African art-dealer, one of those snake-oil salesmen who mistakes a pile of garbage for an artwork. Russo (Gilroy’s wife, and another Nightcrawler holdover) plays an old punk turned upwardly-mobile art-dealer, forever looking for new wares to fence, ruthless to the last. John Malkovich is her old-guard client, a post-modernist painter; Daveed Diggs her new object of affection, a street artist concerned with preserving his ‘real’ness. Billy Magnusson plays a gallery-hand who can’t stop boasting of how he’s not just the installer, but an artist in his own right. And Natalia ‘Nancy Wheeler’ Dyer plays a luckless, put-upon, fresh-off-the-bus intern/assistant, whose great gag is that all her employers end up dying. These characters have amazing, neo-Dickensian nomenclature, too: things like Morf Vandewalt, Ray Ruskinspear, Jon Dondon, Vetril Dease, and Rhodora Haze. These names — and its own title — effectively sum up the silliness of the whole lark, Velvet Buzzsaw a weird mix of arthouse, grindhouse, sketch-comedy, and clown-show.

HIGH FLYING BIRD

★★★1/2

Whatever you think an ‘iPhone movie’ is supposed to look like, High Flying Bird isn’t it. Everyone’s favourite ‘retiree’, Steven Soderbergh — who’s probably completing another project while you read this — shot this film employing a consumer-grade telephone as his chief photographic vessel. But it’s not hand-held, shaky, floating through space, delivering pixelated imagery that evokes both video’s vérité and something slightly surreal. He did that, last time, with the madhouse paranoia-thriller Unsane, in which the ultra-closeness of the iPhone-as-camera had him peering all up in Claire Foy’s biz, out to convey her warped perspective.

Instead, here, the compositions are still, carefully framed, richly widescreen. Wide-angle lenses are used to capture metropolitan space, to bend its lines, and distort perspective. When the camera moves, it’s classic tilt and pan. At times, High Flying Bird is visually reminiscent, somehow, of Soderbergh’s work on The Knick. Because of André Holland being at its centre, sure, but also in the way it employs light sources within the frame, has characters move through interior spaces, and lovingly photographs architecture; as if these’re twin visual portraits of New York City, as place and myth, 120 years apart.

Written by Moonlight scribe Tarell Alvin McCraney, it’s a sharp, brisk, very-wordy drama set during a non-branded NBA lockout. Holland plays an agent representing Melvin Gregg (AKA American Vandal’s DeMarcus Tillman!), an incoming rookie who’s burnt through piles of cash, before ever actually earning any of his imminent millions. Both client and player are desperate; as are the boss of the agency (Zachary Quinto), the players-union rep (Sonja Sohn), the New York franchise’s owner (Kyle MacLachlan), and Holland’s ambitious former assistant (Zazie Beetz). Ultimately, something has to give; though Soderbergh routinely cuts around the action, leaving definitive incidents — like a House Of Highlights-worthy one-on-one showdown between Gregg and Justin Hurtt-Dunkley’s established star, on which so much dramatically hinges — happen off screen or between edits.

McCraney’s script, too, is a kind of meta-commentary; its verbose monologues are beautifully written and fabulously orated (a showdown between Holland and mom-as-manager Jeryl Prescott is a veritable battle-of-wills over sipped-tea and front-room niceties), yet often make the film feel like it’s talking aloud the themes whilst skirting around the real mechanisms of drama. Amongst the many words, we hear veteran local hoops sage Bill Duke and Holland talking about “the game on top of the game”, ie., the professional leagues and grand financial machine built upon basketball.

In turn, High Flying Bird is a film about basketball that’s never really about basketball; this feeling, instead, like another Soderbergh joint that uses a populist lure (like male-strippers or high-class call-girls) to investigate late-period capitalism. So, basketball fans will surely be intrigued that Donovan Mitchell, Karl-Anthony Towns, and Root-Canal Reggie Jackson all make appearances, but what they’re served is a heady interrogation of who ‘owns’ the game, situating this theme on a continuum of a horrendous American history of black exploitation, unscrupulous capitalism, and management/worker conflict.

IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK

★★★★★

Sometimes, as film critic, it’s hard to find the words. This isn’t the case when you’re reviewing a terrible movie — there’s no limits to making fun of, say, Batman v. Superman: Dawn Of Justice — but, instead, that paralysis usually occurs when you’re tasked with typing about a transcendent one. Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk is a film like this: a piece of pure cinema, poetic and rapturous, in which the artform’s elements —image, sound, colour, movement, montage, music — merge into a glorious, seamless swirl, thick and intoxicating as a cloud of perfume.

If Beale Street Could Talk marks Jenkins’ much-awaited follow-up to his Oscar-winning breakout Moonlight. And though it lacks that film’s little-movie-that-could narrative, there’s no doubting this is the superior picture. If Jenkins’ directorial work can be seen through the prism of his filmmaking hero, Wong Kar-wai, this is the equivalent of going from Happy Together to In The Mood For Love. The spectre of Wong lingers throughout: from the obtuse angles, intuitive compositions, and ultra-shallow focus that Jenkins favours; to — most of all — the lush, sumptuous use of colour, evident not just in light and shade, but wallpaper and drape, wardrobe and décor. Where Moonlight was a story told in various shades of blue, purple, and black (evoking its original stageplay, by High Flying Bird scribe Tarell Alvin McCraney, titled In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue), If Beale Street Could Talk uses a far-softer palette of, largely, browns and oranges and yellows, with green used as contrasting colour (especially in various amazing patterned and checked dresses).

The film’s an adaptation of a novel by James Baldwin, the late poet-laureate of the civil-rights struggle. Where cinematic audiences will be familiar with Baldwin as a fiery, defiant, dissident figure from Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, here the tone is entirely different. Though Beale Street is a sure portrait of institutionalised racism  — of an American legal system in which being black is akin to being guilty — this isn’t a work of fury, driven forward by righteous indignation. Nor is it, even, a tragedy; lives torn apart by wrongful arrest, and a system unfairly stacked against them. Instead, it’s stunningly beautiful, surprisingly hopeful, and defiantly romantic; a film not about rage, but affirmation; not invective, but love.

That love flowers between KiKi Layne (an amazing debutante turn) and Stephan James (from Homecoming), childhood sweethearts who’ve always known each other. Jenkins, in an adaptation unconcerned with linearity, offers montaged flashbacks to their shared upbringings, the past that has led to this ill-fated present, where she is pregnant, and he’s locked up for a crime he didn’t commit. Jenkins’ great directorial gesture is to forever frame our paramours staring down the lens, audiences getting to experience both their looks of rapturous love and their interrogating stares, drilling into our interloper’s outsiderdom, and, thus, our societal complicity.

When Layne eventually stares, in the same enraptured fashion, down the barrel at the newborn baby who arrives in the third act, If Beale Street Could Talk amplifies the power of this look-of-love; making this a film not just about romance, but about how it can lead to new life. Each is impossibly precious and utterly unlikely, rare treasures offering pure grace in the face of a hostile world. Perhaps this is where the magic of Jenkins’ movie lays: not just in its component parts (that Nicholas Britell score!) or its sensorial, experiential affect, but the way that it’s a film about these minor miracles that feels, itself, miraculous.

ON THE BASIS OF SEX

★★★

Hey, lookie here! It’s the Oscarbait biopic that was scooped by a documentary! Whilst there’s an old Hollywood belief that audiences would rather watch a dramatisation than a documentary (something Robert Zemeckis has taken all too much to heart, with The Walk and Welcome To Marwen), On The Basis Of Sex shows that, perhaps, the times are achanging. Whilst Betsy West & Julie Cohen’s documentary portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, RBG, found surprising box-office success and attendant awards-show nominations, Mimi Leder’s famous-person biopic has received none of the same love; largely playing as if coming in the wake of the former, arriving late to the party in an old-fashioned outfit.

Which isn’t to say that On The Basis Of Sex is a failure of anything but timing (this is not, then, a Zemeckian disaster). It’s a perfectly-fine mish-mash of perennially-appealing but dreadfully-conventional genres: the early-rise-of-a-famous-person biopic, the history-making courtroom drama, and the underdog sports-movie.

Here, we see a young RBG — played by a dentured Felicity Jones, gunning for that Oscar — battling sexism at Harvard Law, struggling to find a job in a male-dominated industry, and eventually setting out on her landmark sex-discrimination cases (cue: the working-on-the-case montages!). Whilst her dream husband, Armie Hammer, is endlessly supportive, the world around her is filled with naysayers; people telling her that she’s going to lose, bound for failure, in over her head, delusional. In response, Jones says trailer-ready lines like “you don’t tell me when to quit!”

The whole thing is a study in sanding away rough edges, to make something non-threatening and crowdpleasing. History is turned into history-lesson, all teachable moments and now-we-know-better hindsight. And On The Basis Of Sex’s grand courtroom finale, with inspirational speeches and swelling music, is a shameless bit of built-up inspirationalism. For those who’ve already seen Ginsburg’s story told in her own words, through the elastic form of documentary, there’s no suspense to be found, only the persistent feeling that you’re watching an anodyne telling of a heard-before story.

AT ETERNITY’S GATE

★★★1/2

At Eternity’s Gate is such an astonishing photographic work that it elevates a terminally-downtrodden genre: the tortured Great Male Artist biopic. Here, Julian Schnabel — an artist seemingly self-assured of his own supposed greatness — takes on the final days of that most famous of mad-genius artists, Vincent van Gogh, forever known for his astonishing oil paintings and the myth-making severing of his own ear.

He’s played by Willem Dafoe, in a bit of casting that, on one hand, feels like an evocation of The Last Temptation Of Christ; especially when Dafoe holds a deep conversation-of-judgment with his own Pontius Pilate (a priest played by Mads Mikkelsen), and when his inevitable tragic-misunderstood-genius death brings a boatload of Christ imagery. But, this piece of central casting also summons the essence of Schnabel’s cinematic/artistic endeavour. Dafoe is a man in his 60s playing a man in his 30s, which is pretty wrong; but his worn face serves as the visage of a character who’s lived a hard life, and an artist at the end of their days, communing with their work and its proximity to the divine.

This is Schnabel’s own ambition for his film; the 67-year-old making a film out to tap into the more mythological, spiritual notions of artmaking, and being a capital-A artist. In turn, his movie — his fifth narrative featurem— is itself out to be a work of art, in such a fashion; less concerned with dramatic tropes and screenplay structure that its own sensorial photographic expressions, which land somewhere between cinematically impressionist and expressionist.

Whilst there are shots that directly evoke the colour and landscape of van Gogh’s later-period paintings, there’s nothing like the recreationist cutesiness that drove the twee-but-wildly-successful Loving Vincent. Working with the great cinematographer Benoît Delhomme, Schnabel’s film is full of intuitive camera-movement, environments blurred into indistinction, deliberate disorientation via sound and vision, and light bleeding into lens, swimming and bending around figures. It rarely feels like realistic document or representative photography, which is the point. When Dafoe says, when discussing his painterly approach, “I need to be out-of-control, I need to be in a fevered state”, he’s effectively speaking aloud the hoped-for approach of the film itself.

ARCTIC

★★★

Arctic is prime man-raging-against-the-forces-of-nature-core. Mads Mikkelsen rugs up for a picture of grim, heroic survival, in which he plays a pilot whose plane has crashed in some frozen wilderness. When we meet him, this crash is already in the past, and Mads is a man at work, tending to his daily chores of wilderness-survival: maintaining the grand ‘SOS’ he dug in the ice; ice-fishing; tending to a grave made for a co-pilot who didn’t survive; and endless winding of machinery. He keeps to a meticulous schedule marked by endless watch alarms, this obsessive routine keeping our hero alive, sane, and in possession of hope.

It’s prime male-competency-fantasy stuff, a portrait of a man camping out in the shell of a plane, on the snowiest of tundra, owing his survival — in the face of the unfeeling wilderness — to his wits, his invention, his practicality, his lack of emotion. When he finds another crash survivor, a woman barely clinging to life, there’s an added wrinkle to said male-fantasy: a damsel in distress.

There’s plenty of man-alone-staring-at-his-own-mortality-movie comparisons to make; for me, the one that kept coming up was J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost. Where that film had a poetic quality to it, Arctic rarely achieves such a sense of poetry, feeling like a grim deathmarch. What it does share with All Is Lost is a radical paring-back; Joe Penna’s flick one in which dialogue barely exists, where drama is spare, and where the grand terrors of an inhospitable environment are allowed to gradually encroach on the viewer’s psyche. Arctic is pared-back in another particularly-pleasing way: at a tick over 90 minutes long, it never outstays its welcome, making for a brisk riff on a familiar sub-genre.

BORDER

★★★1/2

Border is an odd bird: at once self-discovery drama, magic-realist parable, and modernist riff on fairytale mythology. It’s a film about trolls, but it has nothing to do with internet message boards. Based on a short story by Let The Right One In author John Ajvide Lindqvist, and co-adapted to screen by Holiday’s daring debutante Isabella Eklöf, Ali Abbasi’s film is better, and stranger, than its Frankensteinian genre-stitching would have you initially suspect.

Eva Melander plays a customs border-security agent who is preternaturally good at her job, sniffing out smugglers and contraband with an animalistic sense beyond the ken of her all-too-human coworkers. Combined with her Neanderthal-ish appearance, we get the instant  sense that our protagonist is something beyond the put-upon, self-loathing, neglected figure the rest of the world sees her as. When she encounters Eero Milonoff, who eerily resembles her in appearance and animalistic senses (and attraction to lighting bolts!), she undergoes a journey of self-discovery, eventually learning that she isn’t the victim of a chromosome deformity, but a troll; the member of a small band of marginalised creatures who live in forests and feed on insects, but’ve been captured, experimented on, and hunted to near extinction. Our troll pair eventually, amazingly fuck, in a gender-bending, operatically-pitched, feat-of-nature sequence hilarious, audacious, and amazing; worth the price of admission for those seeking genuine cinematic strangeness.

Eventually, Border becomes a study in self-determination, with a moral quandary —involving a ring of child-porn video-makers, unfertilised troll embryos, and intersections thereof — presented to our heroine. Both humans and trolls offer examples of inhumanity and evil, rapacious desires that speak of both evolution and perversion. Melander is told to choose a side, to believe in the superiority of one over the other; eventually settling, happily, on embracing and embodying the more noble notions of either species. It’s a tale (with a tail!) prime for interpretation, a parable that plays things unexpectedly straight, its absurdity counterbalance by its unwavering sincerity.