The Northman

One thing’s for sure and that’s that Robert Eggers’s no-holds-barred historical Viking action-thriller, The Northman, is not for the fainthearted. Blood and guts spill in every other scene; flesh is torn with teeth, villagers are burned alive; men bark and belch; all is drenched in mud and sweat. Bizarre otherworldly images set against AD914 Icelandic fjords are steeped in Norse mythology, from erupting volcanoes to flocks of ravens, a valkyrie riding a white horse into paradise in the sky to a tree of full of dead ancestors emerging from a king’s innards.

The story is loosely based on the legend of Amleth (which allegedly also inspired the Bard to pen Hamlet), the Viking prince who vowed to avenge his father, King Aurvandil’s (a gravel-voiced and long-haired Ethan Hawke) murder – which he watches take place at the hands of his uncle, Fjölnir (Claes Bang, previously also brilliant in BBC’s Dracula) as a child – and to rescue his mother, Gudrún (an ethereal, yet wild Nicole Kidman), who is taken as queen.

Alexander Skarsgård leads the all-star cast as the grownup Amleth. We find him utterly transformed: built like a brick shithouse, howling and snarling like a wolf, his physicality alone is a sight to behold, as he and a band of unhinged berserkers ruthlessly massacre and enslave innocent villagers. A glimmer of beauty amidst the barbaric gore is a perfectly cast Anya Taylor-Joy as the tenacious platinum-haired Olga – the only woman who can thaw Amleth’s ice-cold heart. Willem Dafoe appears as a jester, then returns as a skull, and even Björk makes a wonderful cameo as a delightfully witchy seer, foretelling the prince’s fate.

The Northman has the weirdest-bits-of-folklore-loving feel of the auteur’s previous work (The Witch, 2015 and The Lighthouse, 2019), but fully unleashed with a $90 million budget. There are the makings of a Nordic Gladiator for a new generation with the unbridled scope and absorbing story of blood-soaked revenge, though things get decidedly more disturbing and feral in this case – and the heroism of our protagonist is far less clear. Thrown in is the appeal of similar scale epics of bygone eras, from Willow and Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones and The Witcher, via some of the trippy sexual antics and hallucinogen-induced horror of Midsommar and surrealism of The Green Knight.

Yet, despite the blinding performances from the cast, all-out production values and total commitment to world creation from Eggers, something nags. It’s hard to pin down, but something seems missing from the heart of this film. Perhaps the vision the filmmaker presents of a blind and unshakeable obsession with vengeance is taken so much to the extreme, it is somehow alienating for the audience – or Skarsgård’s impressively animalistic incarnation means enough of a human connection to his character isn’t possible, leaving investment in his fate to fall flat. Or, further, the image of raging masculinity, where a merciless fight to the bloody death is the answer to almost everything, so belongs to another millennia as to be hard to find sympathy with in the modern day. That, and the scale promised by the first half of the film actually seems to shrink as the minutes wear on, while the plot becomes increasingly nonsensical.

But if one is to judge a production purely on technical accomplishment, there is no doubt that The Northman lands with flying colours. Boldly brutal, outrageously ambitious and viscerally executed, this is cinema magnificently made for the big screen.

Sarah Bradbury

The Northman is released nationwide on 15^th April 2022.

Watch the trailer for The Northman here: