REVIEW: ‘The Northman’ revels in raw Viking myth
Alexander Skarsgård stars as Prince Amleth in The Northman, directed by Robert Eggers.
To be a Viking berserker, warriors had to work themselves into a physical and spiritual frenzy. It allowed them to act as 10th-century shock troops; high on a shared belief that they were inhabited with animal spirits, berserkers could run into battle, brutalize their enemies and strike fear into anyone who saw them. I know that if I saw a hulking, blood-soaked dude resembling Alexander Skarsgård ripping out my comrade’s throat with his teeth, I might have second thoughts about staying in the fight.
It would be silly to say that The Northman, the new film from Robert Eggers, immerses you in Viking life the way a berserker ritual would. But on a movie-watching level, it does the next best thing. In contrast to the noble, scrubbed-clean version of Norse mythology glimpsed in the people of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings, the Vikings of The Northman are dirty, violent, and obsessed with glory. Eggers’ film drags you bodily into a world where zombie kings, eyeless witches, and the talking severed head of Willem Dafoe are as real to the characters as their windswept settlements.
The goal, according to Eggers, is to present the culture in the most accurate way possible. That sounds counterintuitive in a film with sequences of a massive cosmic tree (Yggdrasil) and a Valkyrie carrying a warrior to Valhalla. But for characters whose lives were inseparably intertwined with their religion, it helps us get inside their heads. This proves important as the twisted family dynamics of the story make us question who the heroes and villains really are.
Skarsgård stars as Prince Amleth, the son of King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke). As a boy, Amleth witnesses his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang) murder Aurvandil and take his mother Gudrún (Nicole Kidman) as his wife. Now an exile from his kingdom, Amleth vows to have revenge, and joins a group of Viking raiders and slavers, training as a berserker so he can become strong enough to kill Fjölnir.
Anya Taylor-Joy as Olga.
An opportunity comes when Amleth hears that his enemy has relocated to Iceland. Stripped of the kingdom by another warlord, Fjölnir and his men are scraping out a small fiefdom and are buying slaves to keep the place running. Amleth smuggles himself onboard a ship and meets another slave, Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy) with whom he teams up to carry out a campaign of vengeance. It culminates in perhaps one of the most heavy-metal climaxes of all time (a naked sword duel on an erupting volcano) but not before a whole saga of disembowelments, horse sacrifices, and creepy artworks made of body parts.
Despite Amleth’s seemingly justified bloodlust, it’s satisfying to realize that Eggers doesn’t paint the warrior as purely good and Fjölnir as purely evil. Viking life has transformed Amleth into a fanatical monster, and Fjölnir is depicted as just as much of a caring father and husband as Hawke’s Aurvandil. Even if Amleth succeeds in crushing his nemesis and surviving to live with Olga, it’s not clear he would be able to build any more of a functional family than the previous generation.
Eggers is perhaps the leading American filmmaker in the folk horror genre, and his confidence in working with truly weird and unsettling images - developed via his previous features The Witch and The Lighthouse - is on full display. Sequences feel like they were plucked from a lavish tapestry found hanging in a mead hall; stark, supernatural elements bleed into everyday life and Eggers lets us decide what is real and what is imagined. Eggers’ consistent editing collaborator, Louise Ford, is worth mentioning here. Much of the rhythmic pacing and sense of foreboding in the movie comes from how she assembles all these components.
Claes Bang as Fjölnir during the climactic duel.
There is a dry humour in the film that leavens some of the intensity. A runic title card is subtitled “The Night Blade Feeds”, the sort of exaggeration that seems designed to bring a smile to your face. In the aftermath of a berserker rampage, the movie smash cuts to the warriors as regular men again, standing around and relaxing as if they aren’t still slathered in the blood of their enemies. That being said, the aforementioned nude volcano fight is possibly the most appropriate closing scene for a movie pitched at this level. Stripped down to nothing but their weapons in the most hostile of environments, the two men clash less like humans and more like primordial gods. It helps you fully appreciate the raw emotion of the source legend, and perhaps how it endured over the centuries, long enough to be the partial inspiration for Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
The Northman won’t win over any viewers who aren’t already fans of violent historical epics. The level of gore and other disturbing imagery, while period-appropriate, may be more than certain people expect outside a full-on horror movie. But for its target audience, the film easily ranks with the best historical revenge flicks - Braveheart, Gladiator, Troy and others. I can’t wait to see which piece of folklore Eggers unearths next.
The Northman gets three and a half stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
The connection to Hamlet is obvious, but Eggers also spoke about taking inspiration from Conan the Barbarian - there’s no Wheel of Pain, but I see the similarities!
I prefer Eggers making original movies, but his grasp on folklore would make him the perfect candidate to helm a Hellboy movie.
A lot of people (rightfully) praised Kidman for her big monologue, but the laugh at the end undermined it a bit for me.