This review was submitted by my friend Anna Boyles, who viewed Mister Organ earlier this year; it debuts on Amazon Prime November 21, at which point I may review it for myself. My deepest thanks to her for offering her time and talent.
Near the beginning of 2016, I went to the True/False film festival. It was a trip provided by the University of Kansas’ film department which I only applied to go on because I had missed the other trip on offer for seniors and juniors in the department. My interests in documentary were pretty minimal. I saw Spellbound (2002) when I was a kid and I’d been exposed to the obligatory amount of Ken Burns that every homeschooled kid has watched. Being homeschooled and growing up around a lot of fundamentalist protestants, I adored Jesus Camp (2006) as well when I watched it with my sister on a rare free evening during university. But the only documentaries I really watched regularly — beyond the ones required for classes — were the miscellaneous true crime documentaries put out by Investigation Discovery.
Which is all to say that I had a general respect for the genre without a lot of real enthusiasm. Those days in Columbia, Missouri opened a new world to me. Strengths and weaknesses that I’d not previously been interested in were highlighted, as well as a diversity of innovations and subgenres.
In retrospect, I think that trip solidified in me an appreciation for my personal favourite subgenre of documentary. I don’t know the exact name for it, nor do I think it really needs one.
The prime example of this subgenre that I saw that year was in Tickled (2016). It wasn’t one of the films I was particularly interested in — as I recall, the summary was pretty misleading — but I went with a couple of girls on the trip since I’d heard that there had been a bit of a kerfuffle at the previous day’s screening. I got myself a little cup of tea and for the next ninety-two minutes, I sat back and watched as David Farrier and Dylan Reeve revealed to me a baffling and ghoulish figure who had been menacing a subculture rarely focused on by media.
If you’ve not seen Tickled, you should. I dragged my sister to see it as soon as it got a wide release and it’s still one of my favourite films. It’s hard to explain the sensation of watching it, or of watching any of David Farrier’s subsequent projects. The closest comparison I can make is the feeling of a friend lifting up a rock so the two of you can watch all the grubby insects skitter away or burrow down into the earth. Come look at this, your metaphorical friend says. Have you ever seen anything like this before?
Beyond that aspect, there’s David Farrier himself, who is generally an active character in his films. Intentional or not, this serves as a clever way to sidestep my frequent issue with a number of other documentaries, which is that of an affected impartiality. Farrier never pretends to be impartial — rather, he is just himself, politely watching the chaotic world around him.
When the runtime of Tickled ended, there was a Q&A session, which began with Farrier taking the mic and explaining that he had just been served legal papers from the subject of his documentary earlier that day. Frankness crossed with a shrugging this might as well happen nature that we had already seen during the course of the film.
That nature runs through Farrier’s oeuvre. Even in cases with fewer post-filmmaking dramatics, like the Dark Tourist series (2018), Farrier goes from serial killer tour to white supremacist gathering to irradiated regions with straightforward candour. On top of this, he doesn’t ask the viewer to make a judgment on what they’ve seen. He simply lifts a stone and shows you the world beneath it.
It won’t come as a surprise, then, that I’ve been eagerly tracking the release of Mister Organ (2022), which came out in New Zealand almost a year before it was released in the United States outside film festivals. I even broke my typical policy of avoiding reading reviews until after I see a film. (I tend to prefer going in with neutral expectations and the only reviews I’ll often read in advance are those found on this site.) (Ed. Note – The author was not remunerated for this comment.) The title alone was baffling. The trailer was ominous and, if I’m honest, a little difficult to follow, as were most synopses.
Having now seen the film, I understand the difficulty of trying to summarize it.
Unlike Tickled, Dark Tourist and a number of articles on Farrier’s Webworm, Mister Organ doesn’t start as a study of a subculture or a cultural phenomenon. It’s about an individual man, Michael Organ, and his exploits over the past several decades. It’s been described as a documentary horror film, which is a fair description, given its uncanny escalation as it descends into madness. Michael Organ’s exploits start as peculiar and off-putting. He first made headlines in New Zealand for pretending to be an heir to the British royal family and the film begins with Farrier’s investigation of Organ’s involvement in what can only be described as a parking lot scam outside an Auckland antique store.
Under Farrier’s focus, Organ’s behaviour quickly turns sinister. He and Jillian Bashford (the owner of the antique store) bring legal action against Farrier. But as the dust from the lawsuit settles, Organ agrees to speak on camera. So forms a nightmarish acquaintanceship that Farrier has compared to a black hole. Over the course of their various meetings, Organ reveals himself to be both odious and boring (particularly when he starts trying to elaborate on his dubious royal heritage) – and then threatening. Their conversations are also interrupted by a cast of Organ’s previous friends and associates, all of whom make it very clear exactly how capable Michael Organ is of making good on his threats.
It’s a mistake to expect Mister Organ to be as wide-reaching in scope as Farrier’s previous work. It’s a far more personal story, a study in how much damage one individual can do to the people he has touched. It’s the story of the sort of villain many of us have met in neighbourhood bullies or our friends’ horrible exes. During the course of the film, we even see the damage being done to Farrier, who is perhaps the only person who can claim to have entered an acquaintanceship with Organ with some knowledge of his nature.
Because, without giving too much away, Michael Organ isn’t just dull and legalistic; he’s also (allegedly) a serial manipulator, a liar, a leech and an all-around horrible person. The fallout he has left behind him is shown in the seemingly unending parade of victims who appear in the film, many of whose stories Organ subsequently lifted for his own future cons.
Much of the film’s horror comes not only from the actual acts Organ has been part of, which I won’t detail all of here, but also his modus operandi in dealing with people. A kind of conversational erosion — slowly boring people until they relent. It’s hard to even keep track of his lies because he talks and talks until the original focus of the conversation has been wiped away. It’s like being smothered with words.
Farrier is pretty brutal in his display of Organ’s behaviour. A particularly memorable scene that had my screening in hysterics has Farrier mute his microphone while on a phone call with Michael Organ so he can talk to his crew about how dull the conversation is.
Somehow, though, Organ’s tediousness doesn’t render the rest of the film dull. If anything, it adds to the mundane horror of it — the idea that, by glazing over, one could be rendered vulnerable. Victimisation through boredom. Beyond the stories from Organ’s past acquaintances, who are each uniquely compelling, the schadenfreude of Farrier’s suffering is a principal aspect of what keeps the viewer hooked in.
Criticism has been brought against the film as to why it was even made, which may seem like a very basic and silly question, but as the story unfolds, the question proves to be really relevant. Michael Organ isn’t a fun hang. He’s like if one of the boring billionaires (Musk, Bezos, etc.) were broke. Farrier himself seems to find spending time with Organ torturous, so the question of why he continues to subject himself to these dull and manipulative conversations is inevitable.
Since this critique had been made in the reviews I read before seeing the film, it did color some of my experience. The film isn’t without answers to this question, however, and perhaps they were clearer because I read those reviews.
I don’t think one could encounter all the people victimised by Michael Organ without being compelled to help them, and the main way most of them seem to want to be helped is to make sure that there aren’t any more victims. Since Organ tends to do things that are just barely legal, this means spreading the word about the potential damage he can cause and warning people away from him. It’s clear for a lot of these people — many of whom are in the LGBT+ community and are otherwise isolated — that telling these stories is painful.
It’s something that Farrier mentioned during a talkback after the screening I went to when an audience member asked the same thing — that the duty he felt to help these stories be told by people who agreed to trust him was his main motivator. And, as a viewer, you feel this in the film itself, in the empathy and compassion that Farrier takes in his interactions with them. There’s another world where this story was turned into a tale of freakish queer drama, but Farrier (who is bisexual) approaches their stories with a light delicacy that underscores the heartbreaking aspects of their stories.
But that’s not the only motivation. There’s one that’s mentioned in the film itself. It’s brought up in a peculiar scene where Farrier is talking on the phone with a friend. Farrier, who doesn’t seem like someone easily shaken up, is shattered from the process of making the film — from the process of trying to get to know Michael Organ. It’s a scene that I’m sure has happened in the background of many documentaries, so I was fascinated to see it on the screen. Almost deliriously, Farrier says he doesn’t want to finish making the film, but he’s too deep in to stop, that he’s now beholden to the production company to follow this through the end.
It might not be the most dramatic reason to an outsider, but in a film that’s so wrapped up in the horrible things an individual man does for even the illusion of wealth and status, it makes sense. By creating art in the modern film industry, Farrier trapped himself in Organ’s company as completely as if he were one of Organ’s marks.
Even with his reluctance to spend any time with Organ, Farrier’s deftness with the simply enormous cast of characters in this film is truly admirable. I’ve already discussed his empathy for Organ’s victims, but I haven’t yet talked about the film’s treatment of Jillian Bashford.
It would be easy to make her a bit of a punchline. Her whole energy borders on Margaret Dumont territory. She couples that energy with the kind of fashion sense previously seen only in middle aged art or drama teachers in teen movies. (I’m still thinking about her little safari hat.) And, honestly, she is a little funny in the way that most self-serious people are.
But she’s not a joke, nor is the viewer encouraged to mock her. In fact, she’s an object of our sympathy. Without giving too much away, the relationship between Bashford and Organ is much more complex than we initially understand it to be. A particular scene stands out to me and it’s a strange one.
The three of them are sitting in Bashford and Organ’s house together, surrounded by antiques on all sides, and Bashford starts to say something that seems to be going in an Islamophobic direction. We don’t find out, though, because Organ cuts her off to explain that she can’t say that sort of thing on camera, because ‘they’ will come after her — which feels oddly more Islamophobic. She protests a little and he doubles down. When Farrier tries to ask Bashford what she meant, she won’t say.
I won’t say more, as I don’t want to spoil the film, but Farrier’s gentle touch with Bashford’s story is really remarkable given her general attitude and behaviour towards him. He tries to talk to her directly and to emphasise her humanity. Even though she seems largely reluctant to be on camera, she’s given far more depth and sympathy than any other filmmaker might’ve allowed her.
That kindness extends to all of Organ’s victims and acquaintances, even those we barely see. Farrier has a gift for making what borders on cinematic portraiture, perhaps stemming from his history in journalism. These portraits are achieved by an intense focus on the elements of a person beyond their own body. We see their physical mannerisms or their collections. A great example of the latter is one of Organ’s victims, who’s shown with his collection of mannequins and statues that made me profoundly jealous. But the visual cue gives the viewer a quasi-familiarity, which gets emphasised when we see the delicacy with which he handles his collection. We can’t judge books by their covers — but sometimes we can judge people by their possessions and how they treat them.
Overall, the only person who doesn’t receive any of Farrier’s empathy is Michael Organ, but that same eye for detail comes into play here too. His home with Bashford, for example, is filled with a collection of antiques, but the bulk of them are not on display. In fact, the house is basically hoarded out. Little pathways have to be navigated in before reaching a clearing in the forest of furniture. These are the trappings that could give Organ the old-money illusion he seems to crave, but instead, they’re all crammed in together and serve no purpose at all in the home.
It’s not the only logical inconsistency we see in Michael Organ. As previously mentioned, he lies as often as he breathes, even about things that he doesn’t need to and, upon being caught in a lie, he just lies more. On top of that, he claims to have high tastes, but his fashion is routinely terrible. He makes himself out to be a genius but can’t even make his claim of being related to the British monarchy convincing, and his grasp of history is laughably weak.
All in all, he’s an absolutely absurd individual and that absurdity almost makes it hard to take seriously the sheer amount of harm he’s done. However, it’s not something Farrier loses sight of during the film; instead, he deftly switches from fully mocking Michael Organ to underscoring just how foul his actions have been. Farrier’s focus on taking Organ seriously — in all his obnoxious foolishness — is what makes the film as effective as it is. As a viewer, watching a bizarre and surreal story unfold, it’s easy to feel above it all, but Farrier grounds the film in the wreckage Organ has left in his wake.
During the talkback at my screening, Farrier seemed to generally be in good spirits. He still had much of the polite, straightforward candour that has made his work so compelling, even as he discussed the negative impact that filming Mister Organ had on his own mental health. In a remark that stood out to me, he mentioned that Michael Organ could only thrive in New Zealand, where being confrontation-adverse is the norm. He then joked that, if Organ did visit the property he apparently has in the United States, he would probably be shot — which, given his behaviour, doesn’t seem that off-base.
The idea of Michael Organ being enabled by the culture around him is an interesting one and it’s part of what makes the film so disturbing. On a broader level, there’s a reason that, before we fully understand his character, Organ feels familiar to the viewer. Modern capitalism breeds a worship of wealth, and that worship informs almost everything Michael Organ does, from his boring tirades about his distant relation to the British Monarchy to his hoarded home full of antiques.
Even with this profoundly universal topic, it’s difficult to judge the purpose of a film like Mister Organ. The purpose of a film is central to most analysis and, because of Farrier’s unique take on this sort of documentary, it defies the normal purposes. There’s a world where it almost serves the same purpose of something like The Thin Blue Line (1988), in that it examines a number of overlooked injustices. There’s another one where it’s like Tiger King (2020), in that it catalogues an individual’s unethical actions.
But these don’t quite fit, in part because of the strange subgenre that Farrier has found himself. Mister Organ is an exploration of a man who embodies the worst of our culture; who treats other people as tools to be used and tossed when no longer useful; who thinks he’s the main character of the whole world rather than a grub that Farrier has uncovered under a rock. In doing so, the film shines a light on a string of victims whose pain has previously been unacknowledged.
And this, to me, is the most crucial part of the subgenre in which David Farrier excels. It’s also what differentiates it from what are sometimes referred to as ‘freakshow’ documentaries. If Farrier did make a film just to air some local Auckland beef, I’m sure I would probably enjoy it, but it goes beyond that. Because, as Farrier himself said during the talkback, we really do all know someone who has fragments of Michael Organ — be it his lying or his boring fixations or his disdain for the people around him. What matters is how we react to them and how we treat the people they’ve left behind.
So, if there’s a reason for Mister Organ to have been made, it’s to deliver this message: be kind to people, listen to their stories and how they tell them, keep in mind that we’re all human and the majority of us are just doing our best — and, lastly, if you live in New Zealand, don’t talk to Michael Organ.
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