Until the Light Takes Us: Critic Reviews

Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell's absorbing, low-key documentary "Until the Light Takes Us" recounts how a few Norwegian musicians hijacked an obscure offshoot of heavy metal and made it world famous.

Their dedication to giving the players their moment on the podium prevented Aites and Ewell from asking provocative questions, or, it would seem, any questions at all.

Until the Light arrives a decade too late to add much.

This is worth seeing for its snapshot of countercultural delusion and the comedy of Varg "Count Grishnackh" Vikernes, pompous crypto-Nazi and incarcerated murderer, whining that the media have distorted his subtle social critique.

In interviews with a few of the key players, the film desensationalizes the story without really demystifying it. It's an intriguing but shallow examination that never really finds a point of view about its subject.

Unfortunately, everything the neo-Vikings say is unchallenged.

That's all fascinating as far as it goes, but to some degree Vikernes is playing his liberal American guests.

Neatly made, but frustratingly anaemic, so keen to avoid editorialising and judgement that it ends up lacking in clarity, tension and even coherence.

When Aites and Ewell manage to illuminate the complex relationship between art and action, Until the Light Takes Us can be fascinating and powerful.

This fascinating documentary takes a judicious look at the Church-burning hysteria that emerged from the notorious Norwegian black metal scene in the 1990s.

This is one of the most inept and clumsy pieces of filmmaking in recent history.

It's an unsettlingly intimate look from inside the movement at its rise and fall; the filmmakers manage to make us understand why the music matters while not giving its violent creators a pass.

This may be the first headbangers' movie that will put hard-rock fans to sleep.

Glacially paced yet gripping.

Long on atmosphere and short on context, the film dances around whatever points it wants to make, sticking solely to the players' points of view.

Rough-hewn documentary of the heavy-metal subgenre black metal and the disaffected Norwegian youth culture that spawned it finds yin-and-yang exemplars to tell the story.

A dull, unfocused and poorly directed documentary that lacks insight and fails to coherently and engagingly illuminate the subject of black metal.

The world is overstocked with flamboyantly wasted rock The The world is overstocked with flamboyantly wasted rock stars and heavily strapped rappers, but few of them can hold a guttering candle to the ghoul-boy nutters of Norwegian Black Metal.

Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell's plainspoken music doc relies on firsthand testimony from band members and key observers.

Until the Light Takes Us tracks the deafening sounds and shocking anti-social behavior of the metal music clan who stand against their country's behavioral norms and cultural traditions.

It not only crucially fails to address the cultural forces that might have spawned the country's prime musical export but it also neglects to include more than cursory snippets of the tunes themselves.

Viking central's biggest cultural touchstone since the moose, black metal music comes off almost as monstrous.