Lords Of Chaos

Lords of Chaos (2019)

Dir Jonas Åkerlund

Written by Dennis Magnusson, Jonas Åkerlund

Starring Rory Culkin, Emory Cohen, Sky Ferreira, Jack Kilmer

LORDS OF CHAOS is ostensibly a musical biopic centering on the rise and fall of "True Norwegian Black Metal" band Mayhem (they always say the whole phrase, every time), who rose from humble beginnings to become kings of a tiny subculture of disaffected, angry youths, only to then become victims of that same community's downward spiral into hatred and violence. And it IS that story, though a telling of it which is almost palpably disinterested in the music which theoretically sits at its center. But it also works as a broad, mildly satirical examination of how angry young men ruin the things they ostensibly love. Which is to say, how pathetic posers escalate into dangerous zealots. With a few details swapped, this could be the story of everything from ISIS recruits to people sending rape threats over STAR WARS sequels. It's not an elegant beast, but it does effectively and mercilessly articulate that particular tale of woe, which sadly feels especially relevant right now.

The plot is a fairly straightforward rise-and-fall template. We begin with the creation of the band Mayhem, by guitarist Øystein Aarseth (Rory Culkin, SIGNS) --better known (to the kind of people who would watch this movie, anyway) by his metal name, Euronymous-- an auspicious moment in metal history made slightly less so by the fact that it occurs in his middle-class parents’ basement. Mayhem eventually recruits troubled Swedish singer “Dead” (Jack Kilmer, son of Val, THE NICE GUYS) and become the center of a burgeoning Norwegian black metal scene, until “Dead” commits suicide. Euronymous, upon finding his body, sees a straight shot to the kind of infamy which will boost his band’s capital, and photographs the corpse for the cover of their debut album. The strategy works, and Euronymous sets himself up as the leader of a devoted local scene called “The Black Circle,” opening his own record shop (with his parents’ money) to use as a lair. But things begin to fall apart after awkward outcast Varg (Emory Cohen, THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES) shows up on the scene and starts taking Euronymous’ shock-bait philosophy seriously, escalating the group to arson and murder.

            In its details, it is a fairly simple thing. It’s based on, as the opening intertitles tell us, “the truth, and lies, and what really happened.” I’m not really sure what that means, but it imparts a good sense almost immediately of the kind of snarky tone the movie wants to cultivate. More specifically, it’s based on the nonfiction book of the same title, a fact which seems more relevant, but perhaps less important. It is based on a true story (and seems quite faithful to the basic facts of that story) but objective journalistic accuracy is less important here than tone. The movie is not intended as a piece of dispassionate reportage; it clearly sets out with an explicit goal to demythologize the larger-than-life music scene it’s depicting. And “demythologizing” means something rather specific in this case. Most musical biopics --if they bother at all-- try to do that with a “warts and all” approach, wherein we see the musical icon at their worst, as well as their best. But in this case that wouldn’t work, because the denizens of the particular subculture we encounter here were trying their damndest to look “evil,” and would be most proud of their worst moments. So instead, LORDS OF CHAOS adopts a different strategy. It offers the familiar highs and lows, sure, but it lingers on the mundane in a way that reveals the most shameful truth imaginable for a bunch of hardcore satanist metal junkies: they were all a bunch of dorks.

            On the surface, the plot sounds pretty intense, and from time to time it is; there’s a bluntness to the occasional violence which is genuinely shocking, and the film effectively conveys the sense of panic that descends upon Euronymous as Varg starts to drag his little community into violent madness. But the movie finds its real reason for being in the downtime between the tragedies: Euronymous trying to look scary for a photo sessions after having his little sister help him dye his hair, Varg stumbling through a poorly-thought-through interview with an unimpressed journalist, the “black circle” pathetically trying to look tough and one-up each, convincing their parents to pay for it all. It doesn’t make fun of them, exactly; it just offers a brutally honest portrait, and trusts that they’ll make fools of themselves without the film needing to do anything at all. Which they eagerly and enthusiastically do. It has not an ounce of respect for them, though it does have an understated but crucial sliver of affection for them, in all their moronic enthusiasm. They may be dumb, but they are just kids, after all, and their follies are the follies of misspent youth… until they aren’t anymore.

Director Jonas Åkerlund is best known as a music video director (he's worked with everyone from Madonna to Rammstein), and there's a little bit of that frantic style everyone used to associate with music videos in here, probably not to the movie's benefit. There are some semi-cheesy stylistic affectations, ranging from the film's smirking voiceover narration to some corny avid-fart horror imagery. But it does get the most important thing right: it truly understands these heavy metal dorks, fundamentally gets who they are, what they want. Åkerlund himself is a Swedish-born former heavy metal drummer (for extreme metal band Bathory) who spent his formative years in the same circles and clearly knows the culture inside and out in a way no outsider would be able to. The movie, by extension, absolutely understands why the kids were attracted to something like this, intuitively grasps what's cool about metal, and, hell, to a certain extent embodies actually those things itself. The idea that anyone except total squares wouldn’t think corpse paint and blast beats are inherently awesome doesn’t even cross its mind; no character needs to explain aloud that this music is blowing their mind, because that’s assumed. It has not the slightest shame in trafficking in metal iconography and horror movie tropes, sees no irony at all in acknowledging that while church burning is clearly a bad thing, it is an awesome and totally metal visual.

I mean, I'm against arson and everything, but come on.

 But in understanding that, it is also relentlessly unromantic about how dumb and lame these dorks were, even at their very darkest moments. The movie is, at its very core, an exploration of the contrast between the epic fantasy of extreme art and the banality of real life. It suggests that Euronymous’ original sin was to blur the line between those two, ushering in a dissociative fiction which gradually metastasized into something deadly. But never into something cool. There’s nothing lamer than someone who just misses the point, who doesn’t get it, no matter how far they push. Varg, as dangerous and vicious as he will reveal himself to be, is the object of scorn more often than fear; he’s a pathetic figure, a desperate wannabe who wanted to be so badly that he actually became the thing that everyone else was smart enough to know was a irresponsible fantasy, not an actual way of life. Even when he’s committing a brutal murder, we’re invited to laugh at his self-conscious tough guy posturing and his laughable ineptitude. And it’s an ugly, slow murder; Åkerlund doesn’t skimp over the nastiness of what Varg is doing, it just denies him the only thing he actually cares about: his image as a badass. He strips him of his fantasy of himself as a cold-blooded warrior, and reveals the bumbling, needy child lashing out that he really is. He may think he’s Hannibal Lecter, but the movie makes it clear he’s just an angry Napoleon Dynamite.

This feels like an especially vital strategy on today of all days. I’m writing this on March 15, 2019, a date that will probably not mean much to anyone reading this in the future, but which happens to have dawned with the headline “49 killed in terrorist attack at mosques in New Zealand.” And that date probably won’t mean anything to you in the future because by then we’ll have seen a dozen more headlines just like it. Angry young men becoming murderous young men is a sickeningly pervasive part of life these days, and that adds an awful urgency to a story about people who, in a happier world, we wouldn’t need to think much about. If these Mayhem assholes were just an isolated aberration, it wouldn’t feel so necessary to try to dig into them. But this snapshot of the groping death spiral of a subculture back in the 90’s feels like the first modern stirring of the now-tragically-common impulse for niche subcultures to “radicalize” --I don’t think we even had that word back then-- and end up visiting their murderous fantasies on the real world. Varg’s chosen name even means “Lone wolf,” the name we have taken to calling these sorts of killers. And now is as good a time as any to say it: though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from watching the movie, Varg was, and remains --you guessed it-- a hardcore white nationalist, and today is probably better known for that than for his terrible music. Mayhem may not have been patient zero for this kind of ideology (and as far as I can tell the rest of the band didn’t share his politics), but they’re certainly emblematic of a rising tide of forces which have spent the last 30 years twisting typical obnoxious teenage rebellion into murderous hate. And that tide is showing no signs of ebbing.

We’ve got to talk about these guys, we can’t afford not to. But the danger in doing that is that you end up giving them exactly what they want -- attention, a platform, an audience. For a normal person, being portrayed as a dangerous, vicious psychopath would be an insult, but for these fuck-os, it feeds into their narcissism and their desperate need to be, if not respected, at least feared. At least taken seriously.

That’s the brilliance of Åkerlund’s approach. If there’s one thing here that only a filmmaker with some real roots in the metal community would have known to do, it’s how he portrays these assholes in the one way which is absolutely guaranteed not to feed their ego. Åkerlund acknowledges the harm that scumbags like Varg are capable of. But he refuses to take them seriously. Because they’re not worth taking seriously. Their ideas are not worth debating, their art is shallow and juvenile, their philosophy is a joke. They don’t deserve to be psychologically probed, they deserve to be mocked. And the best way of doing that is to strip away their self-aggrandizing personas to reveal what bumbling, dull losers they are. Dangerous, sometimes, but only in the most banal, pathetic sort of way. They’d never object to being portrayed as evil, vicious scumbags, but they hate being portrayed as shallow, preening chumps (and just in case you had your doubts, the remaining band members regarded the film as a “big fuck you,” which it most certainly is. Varg himself* called it “character murder,” which is fucking rich coming from an actual murderer, and was especially incensed about the movie’s brilliant alpha dog move of casting a Jewish actor as him. Only a movie that really understood these guys would be able to get under their skin this badly, which is a noble enough goal to make it entirely worth making the movie even if it had no other artistic merit of any kind).  

Not everyone seemed to understand that approach: “Åkerlund likes the immediacy of an awful act….But there’s also an unmistakable tone of jokey disdain for hollow youth... Ultimately it all adds up to a hodgepodge of styles and attitudes with hardly any insight into what made this corrosive clique so magnetic to its adherents,” complained the LA Times’ Robert Abele. But that misses the whole point; it’s the hollowness and the strange, stupid naïveté of it all that explains the whole thing. The lack of insight is the insight, because there’s nothing especially interesting or well-thought-through about any of this. None of it was necessary, none of it was inevitable, it was just something dumb that happened when a bunch of dumbasses competing with each other got out of control because everyone involved was too self-interested and shallow to stop it. Remember: metalheads are the jocks of the musical world. Affording these guys the dignity of prying into their psyche would be an insult to their victims. They were just dumb, selfish young men, and, as will happen when such a group gets together, one thing led to another. Their motives were as shallow as their philosophy, and worthy of about the same cursory level of scrutiny.

And yet, we do need to stop this kind of tragedy in the future, and so the film invites us to wonder, who is responsible? Is Euronymous actually Donald Trump, a vain, cowardly poser whose phony tough-guy stance ends up inspiring guys like Varg --or the New Zealand shooter-- to go out and live their violent ethos for real? Or is he more like (one possible reading of) the central character in AMERICAN SNIPER, a fundamentally sensitive soul trapped in a brittle, macho ethos which he lacks the emotional tools to adequately challenge as a poisonous fantasy, and who ends up perpetuating that very ethos because it’s become too intrinsic a part of his identity for him to know how to do anything else? Perhaps overly generously, Åkerlund and (especially) Culkin seem to see Euronymous as the latter, and do their best to let us read his “evil” posturing as a symptom of his insecurity and inability to deal with the trauma of his friend’s suicide. Culkin called him “a bit of a sweetheart” and strongly implies with his performances that Euronymous’ violent rhetoric and nihilist front was a put-on, a harmless geek show that ended up getting away from him, at worst a somewhat irresponsible cover for a needy kid who doesn’t know how to appropriately express his feelings.

 But of course, that diagnosis (minus the “sweetheart”) could describe Varg just as easily, and the movie mercilessly tracks his descent from pathetic reject to cold-blooded killer. Euronymous may not have meant any harm, and he may have been a benign little weasel with just enough savvy to understand that shock tactics bring attention. But it’s kind of hard to let him off the hook when his actions had so many real-world consequences that he never took any responsibility for. One of those real-world consequences eventually affected him directly (making this a rare case of an instigator who also ended up a victim), but even this sympathetic portrayal seems to openly acknowledge that he shares a lot of the blame here. None of this would have happened without him. Hate-fueled killers feed off the claptrap of phony self-interested con men like Euronymous, from politicians to preachers to TV talking heads and internet agitators, amoral hustlers all, who see an easy mark in the the beta-male outcasts who transform their self-serving bullshit into true hate. They’re charlatans, not true believers, but you don’t get to duck the responsibility for your actions just because you’re a transparent fraud. It’s easier to have some sympathy for Euronymous, who, after all, was only a fucking kid, and even at the end doesn’t seem to quite understand what he’s unleashed. But still, he set this in motion, he kept it going, and he was perfectly happy to enjoy the benefits of notoriety even after the harm it was doing was perfectly clear.  

Which forces me to ask: am I part of the problem too? After all, you know what these assholes have in common? They look like me. They came from the same background I came from. They watch the same movies, dig the same music, run in the same circles. I was once a teenage asshole who thought he was edgy, too. I wasn’t a black metal guy myself, but is being into over-the-top provocative movies that much different from being into over-the-top provocative music? Am I, thinking I’m being a perfectly harmless little shithead, actually just as guilty as Euronymous in aggrandizing a culture and a fantasy which has disastrous real-world consequences? Are those guys a frustrating persistent bug in the system, or do we need to start worrying that they’re actually a feature?  

There was a time when I was a evangelical free-speech absolutist, and the answer to these questions was a simple one: no, you don’t have to feel responsible for whatever wrong idea some nutcase takes from your art, and no, you don’t need to apologize for the art you enjoy. Scorsese has no responsibility for John Hinckley, DIRTY HARRY doesn’t owe the world a good moral lesson, Venom (the extreme metal band, not the beloved Tom Hardy film) --referenced by both Euronymous and Varg-- isn’t to blame if a few demented fans don’t understand their whole Satanism schtick is an act, just a logical next stop in the footsteps of Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne. Art doesn't kill people; people kill people. And after all, before we start fretting about violent lyrics and swear words, let’s not forget that we already had a moral panic about heavy metal music, and we lived to regret it; in fact, in 1993, the Satanic Panic which heartlessly pathologized the genre and persecuted its dumb, harmless fans was still in full swing. The West Memphis Three were convicted the next year. Metalheads really are mostly sweethearts, and their lives are already hard enough due to their poor social skills and terrible taste in music (just kidding, metalheads. You know I love you). It's unfair and harmful to demonize them and treat them with suspicion just because they like bands with names like Darkthrone or Napalm Death. And besides, fantasy, including (and perhaps especially!) anti-social fantasy, is part of the human experience, and it’s something that we intrinsically demonize at our great peril.

That side was always easy for me to see. And I still see it, obviously, especially where the law is concerned. But there’s another side that didn’t come as easily (the side that, I think it’s worth saying, seldom comes easily to people who come from some degree of social and economic privilege): art, fantasy, and speech are slippery things, never as comfortably abstract and removed from reality as they sound. Art is important, fantasy is important, speech is important, precisely because they are not some benign aesthetic thing independent of the real world. They wouldn’t be worth fighting for if they were. These are powerful, vital tools that we use to shape our understanding of ourselves and the reality we inhabit, and consequently they have tremendous power to influence people and cultures in profoundly negative ways, both maliciously and through casual indifference. Art can hurt. Fantasy can kill. Speech can oppress. All freedom has a cost, and that cost is often paid by someone else, most likely someone who is already a target for one reason or another (it’s no coincidence that the first victim of violence here is a gay man; insecure assholes will always kick the suffering down, because it’s safer than directing their anger at someone who might actually deserve it). Once upon a time, maybe even as recently as 1993, an artist --or anyway, a white, male artist of modest economic privilege-- was typically asked only to look inwardly, to draw something from inside and release it out into the world. It’s an appealing perspective for an artist, affording endless personal freedom and demanding no accountability. But it’s a myopia we can ill-afford anymore. If we embraced it in ignorance once, we cannot claim to do so any longer. The act of creation alters the world, and no one wielding the power to do that has the right to shirk the responsibility that power imparts upon them.

 But of course, the power of art to shape reality is never a simple linear thing. Art that’s very bad for one person may be very good for someone else, and, anyway, however benign and prosocial you might try and make your art, there’s always gonna be some nut who takes the wrong idea from it. The point is not that art should only depict good morals, or that it needs to relate directly to reality at all. In fact, the point is not really about art at all. It’s about people. We’ve got to be aware of what we’re putting out into the world because we have a responsibility to our fellow humans, and a shared investment in helping to guide them --individually and as a culture-- to a better place. After much soul-searching, that’s the conclusion I came to. Not that Euronymous ruined everything because he wrote lyrics that inspired people to violence (the movie couldn’t be less interested in his music, and you can’t make out the lyrics in any case) but that he built a subculture which brought out the worst in people, used them for his own self-gratification. His original sin was not an interest in loud music and morbid subjects, it was using the death of his friend as a marketing stunt. And he didn’t even do that because he was a heartless psychopath, but because, ultimately, he was a “bit of a sweetheart,” but alas, one too cowardly and juvenile to deal with his feelings directly. That weakness, and the need for a cartoonishly exaggerated show of strength to cover it over, was the poison that curdled a subculture that could have, under different circumstances, really helped people.

After all, this is ultimately about outcasts who are desperately in need of a home. Abele wondered why the movie doesn't explore "what made this corrosive clique so magnetic to its adherents." But isn't it obvious? These kids were feelings isolated and and alienated and unwanted in a small, homogeneous country that didn't offer much space for social misfits. Of course they leapt at the chance to find some acceptance within a community of kindred spirits. Most people, and especially most young people, experience this feeling to some extent, but for some --like the maladroit social rejects we find here-- it's much more intense and more difficult to achieve, and consequently can be almost all-consuming. A deep and unrequited need for connection and community is a powerful force, and people desperate enough will do almost anything to find it and hold onto it... making them easy targets for more self-serving community leaders with their own interests in mind. 

This is the simple, sad why behind all the aberrent behavior LORDS OF CHAOS chronicles. It’s not for nothing that the first time we see Varg, he’s no threat to anyone, he’s just an awkward kid sitting by himself, trying to get up the courage to go talk to the cool guys. And the first thing Euronymous does is casually cut him down, sending him shame-faced back to his lonely corner. Obviously Varg is responsible for his own actions, and at some point crosses lines that no one is going to be able to bring him back from. But one act of casual cruelty begets another. The Vargs of the world don’t start out as bad seeds. The thing that makes them scary is that they’re so normal and pathetic. There’s nothing special about them, and that’s why no one ever sees them coming. Their flaws are mundane; flaws we could even be sympathetic to if they didn’t end up twisting into something so hateful. But one can’t help but think: what if Euronymous had been a little nicer? What if he hadn’t been so up his own ass on a power trip as the leader of his gang, what if he’d just learned to relax and enjoy living his dream on his parent’s dime, and offered a little acceptance and community instead of callous derision designed to feed his own ego? Straight society thought Mayhem’s loud music and scary makeup and morbid fixations were signs that they were deviant and dangerous. But the truth was something much more mundane: the only thing that made them dangerous was that they were selfish assholes, and one selfish asshole begets another. And if no one stops the cycle --especially where young men are concerned-- sometimes things end up getting really, really out of hand.

 LORDS OF CHAOS was originally slated to be directed by Sion Sono, who would almost certainly have made an amazing, intense movie out of the material, as he always does. But having someone who came from this world behind the camera gives the version we got a perspective that I don’t know that Sono would have understood. So much of the world of Mayhem is about aggressive provocations, about an art and aesthetic which are so extreme that they seem like they could only meaningfully address huge, abstract concepts. It’s easy to look at their art, and then at the extreme violence which ultimately invaded their real lives, and assume you’ve stumbled upon some dark, hidden underworld completely unfamiliar to outsiders. But Åkerlund deftly dissipates that kind of mythologizing with a sobering reminder that there’s nothing at all special about these guys, except that they really did make some pretty baller metal. Other than that, this exact thing could have happened to anyone. There was nothing epic about it, nothing unique, just ordinary, immature, insecure idiots bringing out the worst in each other. So maybe don’t be such an asshole all the time, and don’t reward other people for being assholes, and then we might just help build a world where we can all enjoy brutal-ass True Norwegian Black Metal and have ourselves a good time without hurting anyone. Surely that’s not too much to ask?

Like True Norwegian Black Metal itself, the movie works best as a blunt-force instrument, and is consequently blind to subtler wrinkles here (the irony of people who loathe their country and its culture becoming ethno-nationalists is utterly lost on it). But as a perfectly honed poison-pen letter to some real toxic assholes, tempered with just enough empathy to never lose sight of the fact that for all their problems, they were still just dumb kids, I can’t really imagine a better version of this same material. LORDS OF CHAOS may not be a great movie, and it may not even be a movie which has a lot of resonance to people who never thought much about extreme metal culture to begin with. But at least for me, here and now, it’s a movie that feels both uniquely prescient and deeply necessary right at this moment.

                                                            FIN

* Now out of prison and living in France, a country which happily welcomed this white nationalist arsonist and murderer and then had the audacity to complain about African immigrants.

Thale

Thale (2012)

Dir. and written by Aleksander L. Nordaas

Starring Silje Reinåmo, Erlend Nervold, Jon Sigve Skard

PRINCE AVALANCHE* with elves, only less so. Two cleaning workers who specialize in gruesome postmortem body removal (often using sponges instead of stretchers) stumble upon a mysterious hidden room in an abandoned house. Leo (Jon Sigve Skard) is stoic to the point of catatonic fugue, Elvis (Erlend Nervold) is a bit greener (especially around liquified human remains) and is just generally unbelievably incompetent, demonstrating poor decision-making skills that would make Darby Crash drop his jaw. So these are probably not the two best people to be dealing with a situation which increasing looks pretty sinister, particularly when it becomes obvious that the previous owner of the house has been keeping someone locked up in a hidden room for quite a long time, with the intention of performing bizarre medical experiments (what is this, a TUSK prequel?). And even more so when the subject of said experiments (Silje Reinåmo, “Ms. Calabash” in BRATZ: THE MOVIE?) suddenly appears, naked and alive, out of a vat of milky mystery liquid.

This is a cool scenario, and for a while it produces a real nice, subtle creepy tension. Just what the fuck is going on here? What the hell have these know-nothings stumbled into here, and what are the consequences going to be? Gradually, we learn more and more about the mystery woman (named Thale) who just may be one of the legendary huldra of Scandinavian folklore. But how did she come to be imprisoned in this hidden laboratory? Inquiring minds want to know. With a premise this strange and sordid, the film can afford to linger a little and build suspense.

Unfortunately, it does more than linger a little; it positively loiters, and the absolutely glacial pace dulls the urgency of the mystery quite a bit. There may be a right time to incessantly linger menacingly in slow motion on people’s faces while Enya knockoff music plays, but that time is not the entire first hour of an enticing mystery. Eventually it becomes painfully clear that this is merely an intriguing premise with no intention of actually building to anything. Even at a barely feature-length 76 minutes, there’s simply not enough narrative here to sustain a whole film. It just ends up being unforgivably uneventful, and a late-in-the-game twist undermines a lot of the sinister setup anyway. Towards the very end, something finally happens, and there are even a couple laudably fun kills, but it’s not nearly enough to excuse the time wasted before it.

It’s a shame, too, because there’s a lot to like. Director Nordaas creates a wonderfully perverse atmosphere, bursting with real-world grime and menacing detail work**. The acting is quite good across the board, and there’s a nice sense of pitch-black deadpan Norwegian humor, particularly at the beginning. And of course, there’s no denying that this is a great, totally unique premise. Everything here is genuinely well-done and even laudable, except there’s just not enough of it to comprise a feature length film. Edit this down to a workable 20 minute short, though, and you might have something genuinely special. It’s neat to see some new ideas for horror premises, especially when they touch on folklore and cultural customs we don’t see on film all that often, but hopefully for his next movie Nordaas remembers to include a story and not just a setup.

*Or EITHER WAY, if you want to go the original Norwegian route.

**And for a reported cost of a palty $10,000 bucks, the movie looks better than most movies with literally hundreds of times that budget.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2014 CHECKLIST!

The Hunt For Dread October

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: No
• SEQUEL: None.
• REMAKE: Nope
• FOREIGNER: Norwegian Import
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None.
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: None.
• BOOBIES: Yes, much nudity
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No.
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Tail removed.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No
• MONSTER: Huldra attack!
• THE UNDEAD: No
• POSSESSION: No
• SLASHER/GIALLO: None
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): Nah
• EVIL CULT: No
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: No dolls
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Yes, via surgery
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: High, tiny budget Norwegian import
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Never hire this incompetent fucking cleaning company.
• TITLE ACCURACY: A creature named Thale, check.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: Indeed she did!

Headhunters (Hodejegeme)

Headhunters (2012)
Dir. Morten Tyldum
Starring Askel Hennie, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

    Vern, in his infinite brilliance, likes to compare genre films to Blues songs. Blues --maybe more than any other popular musical genre-- are rigidly structured in terms of style, texture, composition, and even content. All true blues songs are fundamentally the same, and yet some blues songs are forgettable background noise and others burn through your soul like your heart was pumping gasoline. It’s up to the individual performer to take the basic form of the blues song and make it their own, make it better, make it richer. They don’t accomplish this by getting creative and surprising you, they do it by milking the absolute most power possible out of the basic structure they’re exploring and giving it a part of their own unique humanity.
    
            Genre movies are like this too. Case in point, the little-by-our-standards-big-by-their-standards Norwegian chase thriller HEADHUNTERS (HODEJEGEME) which opens this weekend (yes, this coming weekend. I know people.) There’s not really anything in here that you haven’t seen done before, and done this well or better. But it’s got the fundamentals down to a fine art and has enough of its own unique personality that it works like a charm.

Askel Hennie (MAX MANUS, which sounds like a truly amazing porn but is actually a historical action film about Norwegian Nazi-fighters) plays the oddly-named Norwegian Roger Brown, a smarmy corporate headhunter by day and fine-art thief by night. He’s got to hold down two big-ticket jobs because he wants to spoil his much-taller and much-hotter wife who he’s worried would never have anything to do with him were he less than obscenely wealthy. Just as he’s getting over his head in debt, in walks Claus Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, GAME OF THRONES) an aggressive Dutch ex-military, ex-special-ops tracker, ex-mercenary ex-CEO who just happens to have an original Rubens painting in his Norwegian aunt’s apartment worth millions. Roger is worried about ripping off a guy who sounds like a Steven Seagal backstory, but he needs the money so he goes for the big score. Greve, whose massive technology company specializes in GPS tracking, is having none of it. And so the chase is on.

One nice thing the film has going for it is that it takes its time carefully laying the scenario out, but once Greve comes after Roger, it suddenly lurches into high gear. Most films would waste our time by coyly escalating things, letting Greve make a bunch of thinly-veiled threatening speeches, etc. Here, Greve just grabs a hunting knife and comes after him. It’s simple and visceral and I like it. We all know the structure of this blues song, so why be coy when we can cut right to the good stuff?  And once Greve starts coming, he simply doesn’t let up. So it’s this vain, effete art thief versus a relentless, ruthless manhunter. Roger knows he’s way out of his depth, and just books it halfway across Norway on a directionless terror-soaked adrenaline tear, with Greve always hot on his tail. 

There’s a nice blending of the shockingly brutal and the drolly comedic here, which suits the film very nicely. Roger isn’t exactly the most likeable film character in the world; he seems vain, opportunistic, disinginuous, insecure. But his punishment is so outlandishly over-the-top that you can’t help but laugh and feel for him a little. It helps that he looks like an exact cross between Steve Buscemi and Christopher Walken*, so he coasts on their goodwill a little. But there’s also something about the naked, childlike horror at all this in Roger’s face which tells us that he’s basically a nice guy. Sure he’s an asshole, but he definitely didn’t deserve this. He’s just an insecure little fellah, mostly harmless, who bit off way more than he could chew. We can all empathize with the fear of suddenly finding ourselves way over our heads, so you ultimately want things to turn out OK for him even though you know this is one of those arty European thrillers which will probably have him come to an ironically bad end. Like he survives everything only to be hit by a truck outside his house or something. You know the kinda shit they like to pull. Anyway, Hennie’s performance perfectly walks the line between making Roger too much of an asshole (in which case you wouldn’t care what happens to him) or too likeable (in which case you’d feel too bad for him to enjoy watching his predicament). So you can root for him and still enjoy watching him get shot, stabbed, run over, poisoned, bitten, covered in shit, etc (man, this guy is practically Rasputin!)

He's his own Quentin Tarantino cast!

                          

It’s rare for a thriller to consistently be both seriously tense and mordantly funny, but this one nails it. There’s plenty of creative action (all very nicely staged) and the film has a nice build to it, sustaining tension and creating a nice rhythm of wild terror and brief respite. On a few occasions, it gets a little too jokey (two morbidly obese twin policemen seem like they should be in a POLICE ACADEMY film) but mostly the tone has an almost Hitchcock vibe -- exciting and very lightly cheeky. Coster-Waldau (probably the best known in America out of the cast) is maybe a little less colorful than you might like from the villainous role, but he’s a credible threat and believable as a guy who has no compunction whatsoever about killing to get his way. Hennie, for his part,  is actor enough that when he’s called upon to be serious, he’s up to the challenge and can bring you along with him. So even when the plot seriously strains credulity, the two leads wrestle us back into caring.

As a blues song, it’s one of those ones which just works. I can’t seriously argue that it’s going to be an enduring classic, but it’s a rock-solid application of the conventions of the thriller genre. Those uppity Norwegians manage to squeeze the genre for all its worth, mining thrills, laughter, and even a little pathos out of a pretty by-the-book premise. Not that it’s completely predictable, either -- there’s one major red herring which took me, at least, delightfully by surprise. A little playful solo between the choruses. Like a blues song, the details may vary, but the fundamentals remain the same. You know basically how it’s going to play out, but that’s OK because the fun is in the actual playing out itself, not the end result. It’s not reinventing the genre. It’s just playing it for all its worth.  

The never said anything about shooting over spilled milk.

                            

*There’s also a theory that he looks like Buscemi and Conan O’Brien (but shorter) which would be even more appropriate given his old "If they mated" bit.

The Thing (2011)

The Thing (2011)

Dir. by Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr [sic]

Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jørgen Langhelle, Joel Edgerton

Recently I’ve been watching a trend which seems to be developing. This trend is the creation of films which honestly have no legitimate reason to exist except that they are perceived to capitalize on name recognition which already exists for some other film --which originally did have some reason to exist—and yet are pretty good anyway. RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. X-MEN: FIRST CLASS. FRIGHT NIGHT REMAKE. THE MECHANIC REMAKE. THE GREEN HORNET. These films tend to either have awkwardly derivative titles (the firs two) or an identical title to the well-known original they’re trying to coast on (the rest). When you make a remake of things which obviously need no remake or extend a franchise where it clearly didn’t need to go, you know who you’re working for. It ain’t the audience. It’s the marketing department.

                So when these movies get made, the reason is obvious: the Dark One is trying to ruin everything cool. But there’s a second aspect here which is much harder to explain, and that is that some of the people making these films seem to be, against all reason, actually trying to make something good. I mean, not all of them, obviously. For every FRIGHT NIGHT REMAKE which demonstrates some real hustle, you’ve got your STRAW DOGS REMAKEs, your GREEN LANTERNs, your CONAN THE 2011 BARBARIANs, your which range from the profoundly lazy to the profoundly ill-conceived. But that’s not news, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Studios and film types both know crap like that is the cinematic equivalent of a sidewalk shell game, a quick and dirty way to cash in on people’s ignorance and laziness and-- it goes without saying-- strictly for rubes. So why the spate of entries into this dismal cannon where people seem to be actually trying? Don’t they know? Didn’t anyone tell them? It hardly seems fair.

    
    THE THING PREMAKEQUEL (which as you can see requires an entirely new noun to properly describe) is at the shallower end of the trend, but I still admire its effort and its fitful successes. The premise is this: Mary Elizabeth Ramona Flowers Winstead is a scientist called down to Antarctica to a remote scientific outpost where they’ve discovered a frozen alien deep in the ice. They bring it back to the base, where the exact same stuff that happens in the original happens again, only not as good.

              I mean, come on, you weren’t seriously thinking this thing would be as good as the original, right? Do you also think that drinking coffee is going to be basically as fun as smoking crack? So no, it’s not as good, and it’s occasionally embarrassingly tone deaf to what makes the original work. Still, you get that distinct whiff of effort; that at least someone in there was trying to make something good. The biggest problem it has is that it’s basically recreating—in a sheepish, self-consciously slightly altered form-- most of the pieces of a much better movie. If you can get past that, though, you’ll see that unfortunately its second biggest problem is most of the new stuff it adds.

      
            Most of the film is pretty similar: group of scientists with beards, shape-changing monster infiltrates them, they’re slowly picked off as their paranoia increases, weird body horror, and did I mention beards? Though not as strong as the original, the premakequel does pretty well with this, at least at the beginning. Winstead is not as strong as Russell, but there’s a pretty engaging supporting cast of mostly Norwegian actors little known in the US. Winstead’s character is unimaginatively (and intentionally, if Wikipedia is to be believed) modeled after Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, just like every single female character in every single modern genre film. Winstead, however, downplays the flintiness of ALIENS Ripley and brings an interesting kind of sharp-eyed opaqueness to her role. She’s obviously smarter than most people around her, but she tends to be quiet when she doesn’t need to speak, and direct instead of aggressive. We get no backstory on her at all, so we’re never exactly sure what she’s thinking, although those big gorgeous eyes are constantly advertising that there’s a lot going on behind them. Kurt Russell – you know he’s a badass. You have to learn exactly what Winstead’s character is capable of, and you get the sense that she may be learning too. So while obviously you’re gonna be happier watching Kurt Russell than anyone the brain could halfway imagine could conceivably date Michael Cera, its still an interesting twist and much more subtle than it probably reads on the page.

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The remaining cast of Norwegian actors acquit themselves nicely, too (it probably helps that they have a Norwegian director in Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. – this thing is practically a foreign film!). They manage to differentiate themselves enough that you can tell them apart, and work hard to sell the concept with sincerity (especially non-English-speaking Lars [Jørgen Langhelle], who manages to be overwhelmingly endearing even when we don’t always know what he’s saying, like Chewbacca). The fact that there’s a language barrier between American Winstead and several of her Norwegian peers adds an extremely effective layer to the increasing paranoia, as her ability to communicate with them makes it even more difficult to form a cohesive strategy. This one also cleverly exploits the cultural divide to splinter the group into distrustful factions, with the tension between human groups that can only imperfectly communicate creating an even more difficult situation. This change feels natural, works nicely into the existing mythology, and adds an interesting layer to a familiar situation.

Likewise, the “alien test” devised in the remakequel at first feels like a half-thought-out attempt to replicate the famous blood test scene from the original without actively ripping it off… but then turns out to have an interesting wrinkle of its own. The fact that it’s able to clear some –but not not all-- of the scientists further splits the group and adds an unexpected element of moral ambiguity which pays off nicely at the end. Is it right to lock your colleagues up simply because they can’t prove they’re not trying to kill you? How far can you go in the name of pragmatic self-protection and when does that become calculating utilitarianism? It’s a nicely nebulous issue and –although I wouldn’t swear the filmmakers considered it—an apt metaphor for age of terrorism paranoia as well.
  

Unfortunately, that’s all in the middle section of the film. Things begin somewhat more clumsily, with a bunch of exposition stuffed up front, a silly introduction to the alien (ever wonder how it first escapes? It just jumps out of the ice all the sudden. Mystery solved!). By the middle, it finds its footing, creating an interesting tension and tweaking the good ideas of the original somewhat elegantly. But then it unwisely changes direction again, and ends up on pretty weak ground. After a great 20 minutes of paranoia, the monster comes back and then doesn’t bother hiding anymore. It flips out and pretty much eats all the remaining characters as a big jumbled blob of CG human features, crawling around and growling and pouncing on people. Which makes it unclear why it bothered to hide in the first place and changes the dynamic from an escalating tension to a more standard hide-from-the-dinosaur routine. It’s not a catastrophe, but it’s also nothing special. Despite the freedom CG affords, the filmmakers fail to create anything as imaginatively disturbing as Carpenter’s body dysmorphic nightmares from the original, and the CG effects make the monster look clean, weightless and, well, CG.

Then things get worse: our remaining heroes follow the thing back to its spaceship, and the film turns from a lesser but respectable version of THE THING into an embarrassing retread of ALIENS. The ship’s design is baldly derivative (except it seems to be powered by this cool 3D 8-bit Tetris game, that’s cool) and the monster which had fooled everyone into believing it was their colleague is demoted to a mindless, roaring beast (it can change shape, but it can’t figure out how to get at our protagonist when she hides in a narrow passage? Lame. ) The whole sequence is conceived and executed about as indifferently as possible, and would have been enough to turn me completely against the whole enterprise.

Except… it doesn’t quite end there. After the big, clumsy, expode-y Hollywood ending, there’s a little coda which finds some intriguing ambiguity. Spoilers follow!

See, Winstead and her surviving buddy (the other American, go figure) kill the crap out of the alien using the fine art of explosions, leaping away from explosions, etc. But then they get back to their vehicle and she suddenly notices that the guy’s earring is gone. When she mentions it, he casually touches the wrong ear. So what does she do? She torches the son of a bitch with a flamethrower. Pretty badass, but what makes the movie slightly badass is that the film doesn’t have him thing-out when he dies; it’s an entirely human scream as he burns to death.  Then the camera lingers on Winstead’s face as she contemplates what has just happened. She doesn’t look devastated or relieved, exactly, just deep in thought. Did she just burn her friend to death over an earring? Or is she pretty sure she was right, and is contemplating what it means about her that she has this kind of killer survival instinct? The film isn’t saying, but ending on a long, quiet, ambiguous note was pretty unexpected after all that trite monster bullshit on the spaceship. (actually in this light the monster parts feel suspiciously like the kind of concession a director might make to the aforementioned marketing department in order to keep the quiet, tense ending that you really want).

Sure, it might be a little more meaningful if her character was better developed, but it’s also kind of interesting to keep her a touch enigmatic. It very neatly but subtlety uses the ending to reinforce the film’s possible allusion to the age of terrorism, where fear of our hidden enemies keep us striking first and asking questions later. But what then, once we’ve killed the people we’re afraid of and are left with only ourselves and our thoughts. What do we think of ourselves? Have we become monsters hidden in human form too? Will we ever be able to feel safe again, ever trust our own eyes to see a world without hidden, lurking menace? Can the nightmare ever end once it’s begun? The film pauses long enough to let us ponder things a little, and that’s when you feel that genuine horror come back. The fear that goes beyond being eaten by monsters; the kind of fear that dances at the edge of consciousness, that can’t be relieved with something as concrete as an exploding spaceship.

This film only flirts with these ideas, but it’s bold enough in pursuing them that I have to give it credit for trying –on and off, anyway—when it obviously didn’t have to and no one besides me and maybe Vern was going to read into it at all or care even if they did.  So this one emerges as a win for me – generally competent, occasionally excellent, interesting enough to justify its own existence, particularly as a minor but respectable augmentation of an existing masterpiece. If they must go on making these unnecessary franchise rip-off movies, and insist on continuing to confuse us by making them decent, I guess we ought to at least appreciate it when someone puts in a little elbow grease. Maybe that makes them not so completely unnecessary after all.