Lords of Chaos

Director- Jonas Akerlund

Cast- Rory Culkin, Emory Cohen

Country of Origin- UK/Sweden/Norway
 

Distributor - Gundpowder and Sky

Number of discs –  1

Reviewed by - Scott MacDonald

Date- 06/13/2019

   Lords of Chaos is based on the notorious black metal book by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind. At the time of release the book was the only English language book on black metal in general, but specifically the Norwegian scene that had taken off to notoriety in the late 80's and early 90's. Soon after the book had come out rumblings began to occur about a film adaptation, none of this came to pass, but a director, Jonas Akerlund, most known for Madonna music videos, and the excellent film "Spun" was seemingly attached to the film for well over a decade.

     Lords of Chaos stars Rory Culkin as Oystein Aarseth (Aka Euronymous). The movie shows the beginnings of his band Mayhem in his parent's basement through to meeting vocalist "Dead", and making him part of the band.  The film in general shows an outsider's perspective in the beginning days of the Norwegian black metal. It shows a bourgeoning rivalry between Burzum's Varg Vikernes and Euronymous.  The film is basically a fairly straightforward depiction of the main events of this scene with the narrative mainly focusing on Euronymous, but occasionally go off and shows other notorious events of the era such as Faust murder of a gay man in a park.

    I went into Lords of Chaos expecting to hate the film, but honestly it won me over for the most part. The film is directed in a sleek and fast style much like the director's earlier Spun.  While showing the start brutality of the crimes by Varg, Euronymous, and Faust. The romance subplot between Euronymous and Anne Marie seemed slightly out of place, but at the same time has some interesting pay off moments like where the duo go to take pictures of Euronymous in his makeup, that depict actual photos of the guitarist. The performances are for the most part quite solid, and fit the tone of the material, and in all honesty though liberties were taken (haircutting, chocolate milk) I can't imagine this material being better handled than it is here.

   Unfortunately, I could say the Blu-ray could be handled much better than it is here. Gunpowder and Sky are becoming almost notorious in their own way for how they present their films to Blu-ray. Summer of '84 was given a BD-R release with no extrass. Lords of Chaos visual transfer is mostly fine with a 1080p AVC encoded transfer that accurately depicts the look of the film. However, audio is only handled by a 2.0 track that seemingly uses DVD audio codecs giving the sound of the film much less punch than is necessary. The extras are just short teasers for the film, and can be watched in less than 5 minutes. The film I would recommend easily, the Blu-ray is severely lacking, and I'd at the very least import the Arrow Video version if you are able.