It's rare for a filmgoing experience to affect me as much as the premiere of Mister Organ at The Hollywood in Auckland did.
I met David Farrier for the first time before the screening. I asked how his day was on a scale of 1-10 (a trick I learnt from one of his podcasts), he told me it had been a 10, he was excited to share this movie with the packed crowd and to host a Q&A session afterwards. We bonded over our mutual friend Wayne and the Jackass film franchise.
The film follows David Farrier as he gets caught up in the life of one Michael Organ, beginning with his days of clamping cars outside Bashford Antiques before delving deeper into his days of abusing both the legal system and the people who have entered his life.
I've been lucky enough to see Mister Organ twice now. The first time I was in shocked silence for most of the runtime of the film, on Monday night with a sold-out crowd it was a very different experience.
Moments of raucous laughter were abundant, sometimes during a clearly humorous moment and other times it seemed the laughter was a form of releasing nervous energy.
Then after the film finished, David Farrier took to the stage with John Campbell for a post-film discussion. The man I met before the screening was gone, making this film was clearly a difficult experience for Farrier, and one he's not super excited to be revisiting.
The tension was diffused early on with a quick "F**k Michael Organ" from Farrier, but as the discussion continued it became clear just how difficult it is to get across the effect Michael Organ has on people in a 100-minute documentary.
It's even harder to explain in a review exactly what Michael Organ is like. This is a man who literally bores people to tears. Who does that? How does that actually happen?
The film is not a bore though, don't get me wrong. There must've been hours and hours of footage to spool through in the editing room and the film is a nothing short of a triumph by Farrier and his editor Dan Kircher.
Fans of Tickled, Farrier's previous documentary, will be pleased to know Mister Organ is similar in a lot of ways. They both pull at a thread which leads to a single man who abuses his power and intimidates those around him. However, unlike Tickled's David D'Amato who barely appears in the film, Michael Organ gets a significant amount of screentime in Mister Organ.
Tickled is the search for the monster, Mister Organ is how do you get him to leave you alone?
The film is a must-see. David Farrier has knocked it out of the park once again, and I hope he's able to get a good night's sleep after his Q&A sessions across the country, because he certainly looked like he needed one on Monday. But I guess that's what too much Michael Organ does to a man.
Oh, I thought of another one.
If Tickled is The Blair Witch Project, hiding the monster from us, then Mister Organ is Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.
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