Montreal’s long-running Fantasia International Film Festival announced 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 will 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.
Fred Topel reviewed Lords of Chaos for us out of Sundance, writing that the film “isn’t a horror movie per se, but it is gory AF and deals in many of the tropes of the genre.”
“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.”
The film is adapted from the Feral House book by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind.
