It’s been a while since we’ve had a bloody orgy of combat, with warriors in sacks and animal skins charging into battle, wielding swords and blazing torches, shields, axes and daggers, and yelling dialogue that usually starts and ends with “RAAARRGGGHHH! There’s plenty of that in The Northman, a muscled feverish dream that makes the insanely handcrafted horror that director Robert Eggers put on the map – The Witch and The Lighthouse – look like Disney movies. To use a term from a ritual fireplace song in which Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth blurs the line between man and beast, this is the untamed “berserker” of Norse legends.
Eggers, who makes the leap from his modestly budgeted earlier instant cult films to this full-scale $90 million carnage for Focus Features, is nothing but fearless. The director benefits once again from the meticulous work of production designer Craig Lathrop and costume designer Linda Muir, and evokes a haunting, evocative atmosphere that coexists us back at the turn of the 10 supernatural.
The Northman
The End Result Wildly elemental, energetic and off-kilter.
The unintentionally overbearing dialogue in the screenplay, which Eggers co-wrote with Icelandic novelist and poet Sjón (Lamb), often causes giggles, and the Scandinavian accents pouring out of the mouths of the likes of Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy and Ethan Hawke come risking upset a House of Gucci trauma relapse. It’s a boldly insane film that threatens to drift off into some kind of weird no man’s land where Game of Thrones meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And that’s even before Björk shows up as a witch-like seer, equipped with wickerwork, shells and beads.
But the Norseman’s marauding energy holds you hostage and Prince Amleth is the handsome, heroically vengeful killing machine with a heart Skarsgård was born to have. Longtime fans will be pleased to learn that he also explores the cultural roots of his ancient True Blood vampire, Eric Northman.
Drawing from Norse myth and Icelandic family tales, the screenplay builds on the Scandinavian legend of Amleth that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The prologue is set in the fictional island kingdom of Hrafnsey in the North Atlantic, where King Aurvandil (Hawke), also known as War-Raven, comes home to much fanfare. The wound in his gut from an enemy in battle prompts him to prepare 10-year-old Amleth (Oscar Novak) to take over the throne, despite objections from Queen Gudrún (Kidman) that her son is only one boy is. Amleth’s transcendental initiation consists of crawling underground with his father on all fours and howling like wolves. Also belches, farts, levitation, and access to disturbing visions of Aurvandil’s wound.
No sooner has Amleth vowed to avenge his father should he die by an enemy’s sword than the boy witnesses his assassination at the hands of his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang), whose boisterousness towards the queen has already been joked about by the shamanistic jester, Heimir ( Willem Dafoe).
“Bring me that boy’s head,” Fjölnir commands his men, to the accompaniment of the shrieking strings and pounding drums of Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough’s hard, driving score. But Amleth, after witnessing the slaughter of male villagers, the kidnapping of the women, and the queen slung over Fjolnir’s shoulder and dragged away screaming, escapes by boat. He vows to save his mother, kill his uncle and avenge his father.
A few decades later, Amleth has transformed into a muscular man who embraces the spirit of a wolf and a bear. He is Fury personified, traveling the lands of the Rus’ with a pack of Viking raiders who never seem to have encountered a Slavic settlement they could not plunder. But Björk’s Earth Mother the Seer recognizes him as the Lost Prince and reminds him of his fate. When Amleth learns that Fjolnir has been expelled from the kingdom he has usurped and has fled to a remote farming community in Iceland, Amleth boards a slave ship bound for labor supply.
Anya Taylor-Joy plays a fellow passenger who knows a good connection when she sees one. “I’m Olga from Birch Forest,” she introduces herself, adding that while he has the strength to break men’s bones, she has the cunning to break their minds. Both are hired at Fjölnir’s farm, where Olga gradually gains Amleth’s trust and he reveals his plan to murder his uncle and save his mother, whom he believes she only loves for the sake of her young son (Elliott Rose). fakes her kidnapper.
Egger’s films share a common fascination with the magical properties of animals – a goat in The Witch (love you, Black Phillip), a cursed seagull in The Lighthouse. The occult fauna this time consists of wolf cubs and ravens, who earlier led Amleth to find a massive sword of the undead known as The Night Blade; The latter engage in their beaks when he is being tortured and tied up late in the game.
The storytelling accelerates as Amleth draws closer to his goal, wreaking slaughter among his uncle’s men and stoking fears of a “whipped spirit” in their midst. The plot gets hectic but remains clear, even if there are an arc moment or two that almost made me howl like a wolf.
Gudrún’s reunion with the son she had long thought dead should have been a dramatic moment. But it’s hard not to laugh when Kidman, who wears Daryl Hannah’s old Splash ruffled hair and sports a Natasha Fatale accent, greets a powerful silver blade at her throat with “Your sword is long” before she engages in an incestuous flirt. As Fjolnir suffers a heavy loss, screaming, “What evil is this?!” Gudrún gives him a wide-eyed death glare and snaps, “Behave!” as if she were a Norse Austin Powers.
Amleth and Olga’s romance has time to blossom in all of this, complete with a post-coital break in the woods straight from John Boorman’s Excalibur. There is also an interlude on a flying horse ridden by a fiery-eyed Valkyrie (Ineta Sliuzaite). But even as Amleth ensures the continuation of his bloodline, his deadly appointment with Uncle Fjolnir at “the Gates of Hell” remains.
That would be the mouth of an active volcano where they fight naked like any decent medieval warrior would, although their digitally erased penises make them look bewilderingly like Ken dolls. I could be wrong, but their smooth ledges in the lava light look more like the result of studio interventions than the prudence of the actors or a director so intent on presenting a world suspended between life and legend in all its sombre glory.
Shot by Eggers’ regular cameraman Jarin Blaschke, the film has a restless drive and a structured flair for the dramatic landscapes, lashed by rain, wind, snow and ice, or covered in mud and ash. The choreography of the battle scenes – both the staging and the shooting in long, uninterrupted takes – is mind-blowing. Also enveloping is the dense sound design, with Viking Age instruments such as the birch horn and bone flute heard alongside the thunderous elements and chaos of battle.
The Northman is certainly a lot of film, and while its hysterical intensity sometimes turns to overwrought silliness, it’s both unrelenting and exhilarating in its portrayal of a culture ruled by cycles of violence. The unity of Eggers’ vision deserves admiration, as does the commitment of his employees in front of and behind the camera.
Skarsgård, who has been developing a film project rooted in his childhood love of Viking myth and lore for more than a decade, has never been more combative or physically imposing. Taylor-Joy, who got her start in The Witch, is beguiling as Olga weaves baskets and wreaks havoc. (Her parents from that earlier film, Kate Dickie and Ralph Ineson, also make an appearance.) Kidman is a scream that juggles fire and ice in a pleasantly over-the-top twist. And unless someone soon casts Bang as a Bond nemesis or some other suitably exalted villain, then Hollywood just isn’t paying attention.
Whether you believe Egger’s insane epic, get intoxicated by his blood-soaked sorcery, or roll your eyes at his excesses, the film will make you realize how seldom we see a big, loud, thrashing spectacle these days that isn’t based on comic-books superheroes and villains, but in a culture-specific story. In other words, a work of bold imagination, not another offshoot of a well-known IP. That alone deserves respect.