Montreal's long-running Fantasia International Film Festival announced earlier today that its "TBA Screening", an annual tradition in which one hotly-anticipated film screened at the end of the festival, which is not announced until shortly before it premieres, will be Jonas Åkerlund's critically-acclaimed Sundance darling Lords of Chaos.
Fantasia thrilled to showcase the film's Canadian Premiere as an eleventh-hour addition to their lineup, with the screening taking place on Thursday August 2nd at 9:45. As a bonus to attendees, this will likely be the last time the film’s original unrated version, which shocked audiences at the film's Park City World Premiere, will be projected in a cinema.
“Based on truth and lies”, this propulsive “dramedy” depiction of the exploits of the death-obsessed late-‘80s/early-‘90s Norwegian black metal scene’s most notorious bands, Mayhem and Burzum, is at once a poignant exploration of Oslo youth alienation and a rambunctious, taboo-smashing assault on the senses. As characters huff the remains of dead animals and burn centuries-old churches to the ground, Ackerlund – himself a co-founder of Swedish metal band Bathory before becoming the rather legendary film and music video director that he is today – never flinches, cranking his storytelling to “11” as he dives fists-first into the band’s ambitions, turmoils and, eventually, murders, with detours into Satanism and suicide.
Starring a fantastic Rory Culkin as Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth and Emory Cohen as Varg Vikernes, Lords of Chaos is a startling and surprisingly funny piece of work that drips charisma and blood. It comes at you from a dark but soulful place, telling a tale of lost boys who want to be evil but have got only partial directions to the specific kind of hell they seek. It’s a tragedy, a comedy and a nightmare; a true-crime oddity laced with corpse paint and inverted crosses. It will stay with you. Adapted from the now-infamous Feral House book by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind.
For more information, please visit https://fantasiafestival.com/en/films/lords-of-chaos
