Lords of Chaos

Lords of Chaos (2018) is a biographical drama-thriller you can watch online on iFILM. Late-1980s Oslo: teenage Euronymous forms the band Mayhem and sets out to make the most evil music on earth. It starts as a pose. It ends in arson, blood and a corpse.

Euronymous (Rory Culkin) narrates his own story as he opens the Helvete record shop and turns it into the command center of Norwegian black metal. In drifts Varg, who calls himself the Count (Emory Cohen) — a quiet kid who takes all the Satanic talk and church-burning bravado dead seriously. What begins as scared suburban boys playing at villainy spirals into torched churches and a murder that tears the whole scene apart. Jack Kilmer, Sky Ferreira and Valter Skarsgård fill out the circle.

The film comes from Jonas Åkerlund, once a drummer in Bathory and present at the birth of the genre, so the view is from the inside and never romanticized. It draws on the real timeline and the book of the same name, which is where the tagline "based on truth and lies" comes from. It's brutal, occasionally hard to sit through, and weirdly funny at its subjects' expense. For anyone drawn to dark music history rather than a glossy biopic. Stream Lords of Chaos (2018) online on iFILM.