See? Church-burning Norwegian black-metallers are people just like you and me.
The Norwegian black metal scene captured mainstream headlines in the early ’90s after a series of church burnings and the murder of one musician by another. All of this has already been well-documented in the 1998 book Lords of Chaos, which is being made into a dramatic film. Until The Light Finds Us cuts out the middleman and lets the surviving musicians tell their story of the genre’s rise and journey to infamy. Unfortunately, these people aren’t necessarily anyone the general public needs to hear from.
Filmmakers Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell moved to Norway for a years to gain the trust of the musicians, but their time with the bands seems to have clouded their judgment. The film consists mainly of interviews with two figures: Darkthrone’s Gylve Nagell and Mayhem’s Varg Vekernes. Nagell is still a working musician, clinging to the days before black metal became “trendy.” Vekernes is nearing the end of a 21-year prison sentence (on account of the church burning and murdering). Both men are given pretty much equal screen time, and the film is rounded out with shorter interviews with other black metal veterans and a pointless subplot about a visual artist interested in black metal imagery.
The problem with basing an entire film on interviews with almost no commentary from the filmmakers is that the subjects, not the directors, end up steering the ship. The musicians’ voices range from depressing to outright vile, with no voice of reason to put them in check. The filmmakers claim that their goal is to clear up some misunderstandings about the church burnings — namely that they weren’t committed in the name of Satanism. No, they were committed in the name of fervent nationalism, which is actually a lot worse. While Vekernes doesn’t get explicitly racist or anti-Semitic in the film, he has previously identified himself as a Nazi, and Aites and Ewell don’t confront this ugly fact.
The interview subjects are left to spew their philosophies about freedom, truth and music, all of which is either clichéd and trite or nonsensical. The result is a movie about heavy metal and church burnings that is more boring than it is controversial. The background story is fascinating for sure, but without the lens of criticism and analysis, this film is just a bunch of unsavoury dudes yammering on about their faded youth.
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