The Northman

 

The Northman

Director – Robert Eggers

Writers – Sjón, Robert Eggers

2022, United States

Stars – Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang

 

Alexander Skarsgård’s long-term desire to make a Viking film definitely hit the target with Robert Eggers, a director renowned and celebrated for his attention to verisimilitude and detail. Eggers calls says, “this is in some respects me trying to do Conan the Barbarian by way of Andrei Rublev”, a description that perfectly captures the twin poles from which it works: rip-roaring blood-and-guts machismo and downbeat adherence to period pseudo-realism. One minute, characters are primally impersonating roaring rampaging beasts, the next we are shored on the pixie-witch beauty of Björk, or the sharp and stony beauty of Anna Taylor-Joy.

 

This tone also makes it a bit of a mainstream outlier: ‘Conan’ had pseudo-seriousness and fantasy fun, and ‘Andrei Rublev’ had existential humourlessness and sublime artiness; but ‘The Northman’ falls somewhere in-between, so that one moment you’re enjoying the Defoe cameo and ‘let’s be a dog’ rituals, and the next you are stunned by a brutal one-shot village massacre which can’t help but remind of the similar unbearable sequence in ‘Come and See’. It’s a big-budget gung-ho action-art film with solemn interests. It is perhaps the same feel that puts off punters from Denis Villeneuve.

 

Starting with a growled narration that would put ‘The Batman’ to shame, ‘The Northman’ offers up an everything-all-at-once splash, like a fevered painting of a historical battle, anchored by the same source that inspired Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’. If ‘The Witch’ and ‘The Lighthouse’ showed what Eggers could do on low budgets, this Viking epic sees him glorying in and using this budget for all it’s worth, as if he knows that he many never get such a chance again. It focuses on the beefed-up, primal wounded animal performance from Skarsgård as Amleth, frightening as a Beserker. His adored father, the King (Ethan Hawke), murdered by his uncle, who then marries his mother. All but orphaned, Amleth loses himself in Beserker rages, which we see in a stunning tracking shot of a terrifying Viking raid on an unsuspecting Slavic town. He is then reminded by casual post-pillaging gossip and a Björk vision of his vow to avenge his father. The ever-popular revenge narrative goes full-ahead, peppered with a little magic-realism and fantasy portentousness and ending up at the edge of a volcano.

But there is no deep slavish dedication to machismo here: the violence may start as exhilarating camerawork, but it’s horror. Amleth’s mission of vengeance brings nothing but ugly truths and betrayals, plunging towards that showdown by magma that doesn’t truly possess the catharsis that revenge is meant to bring.

 

Perhaps this dour, existentialist tone is why David Stratton calls it “surprisingly dreary”? Filmspotting feels the need to ask, “does the director’s new Viking revenge epic add up to anything but a bloody good time?” So which is it: drearily reflective or rip-roaring mindlessness? That Eggers delivers the pleasures from both ends without losing balance is ‘The Northman’s overall artistic success. Fun, furious fantasy and packed with a seriousness approach to theme and detail that will reward multiple watches. It’s epic, pretty, a bit crazy, a bit lost in its own detail and excess.