Until the Light Takes Us
Until the Light Takes Us Image
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Metascore
54 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 8 Critics What's this?

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  • Summary: Until The Light Takes Us tells the story of black metal. Part music scene and part cultural uprising, black metal rose to worldwide notoriety in the mid-nineties when a rash of suicides, murders, and church burnings accompanied the explosive artistic growth and output of a music scene that would forever redefine what heavy metal is and what it stands for to other musicians, artists and music fans worldwide. Until The Light Takes Us goes behind the highly sensationalized media reports of "Satanists
    running amok in Europe" to examine the complex and largely misunderstood principles and beliefs that
    led to this rebellion against both Christianity and modern culture. To capture this on film, directors Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell moved to Norway and lived with the musicians for several years, building relationships that allowed them to create a surprisingly intimate portrait of this violent, but ultimately misunderstood, movement. The result is a poignant, moving story that’s as much about the idea that reality is composed of whatever the most people believe, regardless of what’s actually true, as it is about a music scene that blazed a path of murder and arson across the northern sky. (Variance Film)    … Expand

Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 8
  2. Mixed: 5 out of 8
  3. Negative: 1 out of 8
  1. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Kyle Smith
    75
    Essentially amounts to an extended interview with a psycho, fleshed out with background material that, while suitably shocking, is not always illuminating or even frank. The film is curiously shy about calling Varg what he is: a Nazi.
  2. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Mike Hale
    60
    Absorbing, low-key documentary.
  3. Time Out New York
    Reviewed by: Steve Smith
    60
    Plainspoken music doc relies on firsthand testimony from band members and key observers.
  4. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Joan Anderman
    38
    Talking heads are overused in documentaries, but in this case a dose of perspective, a point of view or two, would have a gone a long way toward turning a pageant of unreliable voices and morbid images into a portrait of the artists and their deadly scene as something more than misunderstood.

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