A movie for black metal fans and all those who fear it

The father (Thomas Ott) wonders whether they are not yet disgusted by the screaming. Although his tattoos bear witness to his own wild times, he can't do much with his daughter Luana's (Selma Kopp) preference for the raw, monotonous guitar riffs and guttural screaming vocals of black metal. However, he only worries about Luana when it is almost too late.

The scene is from "Wolves", the first feature-length film by Jonas Ulrich, which is being released in Swiss-German cinemas on Thursday. Wasn't he afraid of scaring off the audience with the chosen setting? Not only with the music, which is rather inaccessible to the uninitiated, but also with the proximity to right-wing extremism that is often associated with black metal? "I have a certain basic trust in the audience," says Ulrich in an interview with Keystone-SDA.

They are definitely interested in special stories and worlds that they are not yet familiar with from their own lives. "There are many points of contact," he adds, for example with other subcultures or behavioral patterns that you can identify with even if you don't listen to the same music. However, such discussions were of course held within the team. For example, how long the concert scenes should be "so that it's not too much".

A young woman in the maelstrom of metal

Ulrich and his team certainly succeeded in conveying the fascination that this world and its sense of community can exert on a young woman like Luana in a credible way. She would rather spend her time in the forest than with her separated parents. Or in the practice room of the black metal band WLVS, in which her cousin Domi (Fabian Künzli) plays drums.

So Luana is there when Wiktor (Bartosz Bielenia) from Poland joins the band as the new singer, whose upper body is covered in mysterious tattoos and behind whose intense blue eyes lurk secrets. With the only half-lied argument that her father is terminally ill, Luana is given a week off from the daycare center where she works to support the band on their short tour of Switzerland as a photographer and social media manager.

"Radical authenticity"

For the authentic portrayal of the milieu, Ulrich drew on his own experiences within the metal scene, while for the script he was inspired by stories from his environment and conversations with women from the metal scene. Perhaps not least as a contrast to his previous work as a commercial filmmaker, "radical authenticity" was central to his first feature film.

Several central roles are played by musicians with no acting experience and the band WLVS was formed especially for the film. Both the concerts in the film and their audience are real. There were also financial reasons for this, but the claim to authenticity was crucial for Ulrich, especially where "everything comes together in metal", i.e. the concerts. It was also important to him that the main actress Selma Kopp, who is not a "metalhead" herself, had to move through the crowd at a real concert - or then sell WLVS band shirts at the merch stand.

The dark side of the scene

This desired "radical authenticity" means that a movie set in the black metal scene must also deal with the dark side of the scene. Or rather: its sunny side, because firstly, everything within the black metal aesthetic is dark anyway, and secondly, the symbol tattooed on Wiktor's right chest is the "Black Sun", a common identifying symbol within the far-right scene.

According to Ulrich, while the proportion of right-wing extremists in the metal scene as a whole is negligible, black metal is "the genre where the problem is greatest". This is partly due to the complex history of the genre, which emerged in Scandinavia at the beginning of the 1990s and liked to provoke the mainstream with drastic elements such as Satanism. Black metal has always "exerted a great attraction on extremist attitudes on the right fringe" because pure provocation often turned serious. NSBM or National Socialist Black Metal is the jargon for this.

The other factor is "that these elements are still surprisingly widely tolerated within the scene". In "Wolves", this phenomenon is shown vividly time and again. For example, when Domi's shelf contains a record by an NSBM band that he "probably got as a present once", when it takes a very long time for the band members of WLVS to draw consequences from Wiktor's behavior, even after they are publicly reproached for his problematic proximity to NSBM. And finally, when Luana is confronted with many "red flags" in her relationship with Wiktor before she is ready to pull the emergency brake. Here again, many people who don't listen to black metal can find points of reference in their own lives.

*This text by Dominic Schmid, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.