MISTER ORGAN - Mark Reviews Movies

Mister Organ, Drafthouse Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 5, 2023

People like Michael Organ, the subject of Mister Organ, have to be all around us, and that's the fascinating and increasingly frightening thing about director David Farrier's documentary. At a certain point over the course of his three-year investigation into this man, the filmmaker more or less admits that making this film was a mistake. That might be the case for him, as becomes apparent at multiple points in the film, but for the rest us, it might serve as a helpful guide to recognizing someone who hides a troubling and troublesome personality beneath a thick veneer of mundanity.

Yes, Organ is a boring guy. Farrier recognizes that fact eventually and after lots of long conversations, headaches, and more conversations that cover the same ground as the previous ones and go nowhere special—if anywhere at all. He also, though, is met with the casual crossing of many personal boundaries, a legal case brought against him that costs a few thousand dollars, and stories about Organ's past dealings that very well might have led to a death by suicide.

No, Organ is not the kind of person you want to meet, have a chance encounter with, or get to know. Farrier, a journalist who covers strange stories and equally strange people, found this man intriguing, especially since his background, past behavior, and current actions are right up his journalistic alley, but what's the point of a good story if it kills off pieces and then chunks of your soul without you even noticing it for a while?

What makes Organ unique among his ilk is his ability to lure people in by an assortment of means. He likes to be noticed, and in the past, he has drawn attention to himself by stealing a yacht from a landlord who evicted him (A crime for which he was tried and convicted in a court of law, despite his insistence that saying he committed said crime is a blatant lie), claiming to be a prince or a count—apparently depending on the day or his mood at the time—by some uncertain lineage, and bringing a lot of people to court on various civil matters.

Organ has apparently won enough of these cases, including the one brought against Farrier over the possession of literal garbage, to make a comfortable life for himself. It helps, apparently, if one attaches oneself to the right people, such as the antique shop owner whose relationship with Organ is an early point of contention, and knows a good, legal scheme when one sees it.

The latter is what draws Farrier's attention to Organ. At the antique shop in a suburb in Auckland, Organ would station himself in the parking lot at night. If anyone parked a car there, he would block the vehicle with a van and/or place a clamp on a tire or two. Somehow, the number of clamps becomes a rhetorical victory for Organ during one of his heated debates with the filmmaker, because linguistic pettiness is a great way for certain folks to make it seem as if they've won an argument.

Anyway, these poor people, who technically shouldn't be parking in the lot, would return to their cars, find Organ waiting, and be told he wouldn't allow them to leave unless they personally paid him several hundred dollars. Farrier started reporting on the case. It caught the attention of the parliament of New Zealand, which changed the law to prevent shakedowns like the one Organ organized. All of that put Farrier in Organ's sights, and because the filmmaker believed he had a subject of some interest willing to talk to him one-on-one, he ends up making himself a perfect target.

The specific details of the story that follows here are too elaborate and, at times, almost too unbelievable to disclose with any fairness, since the whole mess becomes one of constant surprise, or certainty. Part of the doubt is simply because so much happens, but a lot of can be chalked up to Organ—who has gone or been referenced by multiple pseudo-aliases, which are mostly intentional or accidental misspellings of his names, with even the question of whether it was Organ himself spelling it wrong so often being an open one. The man will tell Farrier one version of a story one day, and the next, he might change it a bit in the middle of a multi-hour phone conversation.

Farrier knows Organ isn't being fully honest or is outright lying, presumably the majority of times that they speak, but if the director dares to call out his subject on any of that, Organ throws suspicion, blame, or even a veiled threat in Farrier's direction. There's a scary moment when Organ announces that someone—a close friend who maybe, Organ says, shouldn't be so close to Farrier—has given him something that only Farrier, his family members, or the most trusted of his friends should possess. Is that a lie? There's only one way for Farrier to know for certain, and the discovery of the truth is as terrifying as something in a horror movie—maybe even more so, because it's really happening and documented for us to witness.

Who is Michael Organ? Mister Organ doesn't have any answers except for what he does on camera, behind the scenes of filming, and a series of shared experiences from multiple former friends and roommates. It doesn't really matter who he is, as long as we see that behavior, learn to recognize the pattern, and stay the hell away from anyone who shows signs of it. Farrier may regret this experience, but regardless, it's compelling—and possibly a great service for us.

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