“This is the weirdest film I’ve seen all year.”
That was my immediate reaction to this New Zealand doco once the credits started rolling, but thinking back on it, it doesn’t seem that strange. It’s the story of a man who, by director David Farrier’s own admission, is fucking boring, and it starts out looking at the titular Mr. Organ and his involvement in a bout of aggressive car-clamping outside of an antiques shop in Auckland, New Zealand. But as both Farrier and the audience are drawn deeper into Organ’s endless supply of shaggy dog stories and bewilderingly frequent court appearances, the effect created is beyond surreal.
Across the multiple years Farrier spent gathering information on this guy, the people who have encountered him, and what must have been endurance tests of conversation with the man himself, every bit of information points to Organ being a malignant narcissist. A compulsive liar… actually, that doesn’t even seem a strong enough description of just how much of it he does, from claiming to have royal heritage (right down to bringing a crown into court with him), to forged documents of boat ownership, to all manner of superfluous things that he’s repeatedly caught on because of the almighty camera. And yet, there’s a peculiar method to the madness. All that time saying absolutely fuck-all, spending hours on talking points that should only take up a few minutes if even that much, and the utter vacuum of substance just sucks in whoever is opposite him.
Even more so than Organ himself, what this film is really about is the collection of damaged people he’s left in his wake. The people he’s lived with or worked with or even just encountered at one point, who were also pulled into his dwarf star-dense web of lies and self-aggrandisement, and who had their souls sucked out. I saw this at a Q&A screening with Farrier himself beaming in over Zoom. At one point, he compared Organ to Colin Robinson from What We Do In The Shadows, and that’s essentially what he is: An energy vampire. And as more and more people are interviewed, and the extent to his poisonous influence becomes clearer, the impulse to cackle derisively at his non-stop bullshitting sours into just pure disgust.
To that end, it manages to say quite a bit about the nature of documentarians like Farrier, who stumble across stranger-than-fiction stories and become embedded in them. Who get into situations that they instinctively know is a bad idea, but just can’t shake off their own morbid fascination to see how deep they’ve sunk into it. Because of the focus placed on those who Organ has gotten to over Organ himself, this doesn’t fall into the trap of giving the man a free platform to further spread his influence; if anything, this is a big warning sign to avoid at all cost.
And while that may seem like a niche reason to release this film (since finishing the production on Farrier’s part doesn’t automatically mean that it would see public exhibition)… well, I specified the screening I went to to highlight why that might have been necessary. When questioned about a similar incident involving a subject from his previous film Tickled, he mentioned that there was a solid possibility that Organ could show up to screenings of this film, if he hadn’t already. No, he didn’t show up at mine (at least, I don’t think he did…), but it turns out that another one of his victims did, who relayed one more insane story about an hours-long debacle with Organ over six dollars. All the way across the waters here in Australia, and his influence still reaches.
With that in mind, this is basically the ideal form of the stranger-than-fiction documentary, as it not only presents a truly bonkers tale about the toxic influence people can have on others, but it effectively shatters the barrier between both sides of the screen in the process. It genuinely had me on edge once everything was done and dusted, making me truly paranoid that I was going to run into Organ on my way home from the cinema; this is the kind of effect that most horror films would kill to get. Guess it makes sense that this has Ant Timpson of Come To Daddy and The Greasy Strangler fame attached to it as executive producer, as this entire production exists in a similar realm of confoundment. Except here, it's all a little too real.
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