David Farrier’s documentaries often land somewhere between small-town Louis Theroux, and balls-to-the-wall David Fincher. Disarming, honest, human, but as tense as any straight-up serial killer thriller from the past three decades. They go well beyond the usual Netflix true crime slush pile in just how numbingly straight Farrier plays them too, casting a naive-leaning, charmingly candid version of himself in the lead. An investigative journalist who’s fallen down a rabbit hole so deep and bizarre, the only way out is with a camera. And a prestigious festival tour.
His subjects aren’t exactly baby-eating monsters either (an underground tickling ring, Charles Manson’s pen pal). Although his latest, a slightly rambunctious car clamper called either Michael Organ or Count Micheal Organe, depending on what side of the bed he wakes up on on that day, lands as just as threatening.
Farrier’s first feature since his 2016 breakout Tickled, Mister Organ is just about as messy and inconclusive as its subject. What starts as Farrier, the journalist, following through on a series of articles about an Auckland antiques store taking local traffic laws into its own hands, soon loses all sense of time, space and general structure, spiralling into a sink hole of locked doors and compulsive lying. Which Farrier, the filmmaker, desperately tries to salvage. One presumably innocent move, awakens a beast that will go on to eat away at almost six years of his life, and approximately 90 minutes of ours.
Enter the aforementioned Organ of the title; a mysterious faux lawyer with a criminal past, who after defending himself in the press, soon wages a one-man crusade against not only Farrier’s name, but his sanity too. A crusade which the film’s poster promises to be “an incredible true story of psychological warfare”, and isn’t far off. Organ’s methods are certainly mental – in every sense of the word. But whether the film ever quite equates to something ‘incredible’ is certainly up for debate.
The fundamentals really shine. Farrier’s storytelling and Dan Kircher’s edit do a lot with very little, making the main narrative feel almost straight-forward, when it’s anything but, letting a very sinister tone gradually seep in from the sides and take over. Lachlan Anderson’s score is tremendously eerie in the most grounded of ways too, and, at least in its opening gambit, Mister Organ delivers a tight enough hook for the mystery that follows.
But it doesn’t last long. A character study is always at the mercy of its subject, and it’s clear that Organ is violently opposed to any amount of digging into his life, and is never going to let the crew escape unscathed. It becomes a frustrating watch, with Organ not so much digging his heels in as pointedly tossing the narrative in the most deliberately boring direction possible. Farrier does what he can with the leads that surface, and by the end, at least starts towards a very somber picture of a narcissist at work, and the toxicity that they sew over a lifetime – not a million miles from a Trump or a Johnson.
Yet still, this is only when he can shake free from Organ’s claws which, even for an experienced journalist and investigative filmmaker, proves nigh-on impossible. As Farrier himself puts it, Organ is such a black hole of a human being – a rambling bore of a focus – that it’s numbingly difficult to find anything at all to take from the footage of him.
The tense back-and-forth between the two men that ultimately fuels much of the film, turns sour quickly, and we can see what’s happening as Farrier loses his grip and ultimately tries to out-bullshit a bullshitter. To the point that watching him go back for more time and time again lands as more disappointing than intriguing. What’s that famous quote often misattributed to Mark Twain? “Never argue with an idiot, they’ll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”
As a portrait of a man locking horns with a social abyss, it’s effective; a close-up experience with a real life narcissist that at its best, will hopefully warn you off toxic figures in your own life, for sure. But Mister Organ will not just leave you cold, but likely angry too. Far from an entertaining, or even satisfying watch.
Mister Organ screened as part of the Glasgow Film Festival 2023.
