“I have relatives in Orkney”. There is a time and we are nearing the end The Northman in which we laughed without realizing it (but the neighbors in the armchair did). Thanks to the lack of tension reaching to the bottom of the jar, it bleeds and guts Robert Eggers (The witch, The lighthouse – there’s always the article huh?) Pollock throws a timid acid into the film’s dark palette here and there (before we forget, there’s also a bit of Gunnar Fisher from The Seventh Seal in the Evening Black and White) if Amleth (Alexander skarsgard) gets into a boat and explains to his beloved Olga (Anya Taylor Joy), that uncle and aunt, but also that I know a cousin, can welcome them in family after years of barbaric and animal slavery on Orkney, one can only laugh. Because the joke (will it be the Italian dubbing?) shows all that structural improbability that I’d like to but don’t want to understand, as ambitious as it is inconclusive that this brutal, harmless Granguignolesco film contains a Nordic saga painted in almost three hours à la page with Shakespeare references.
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Let’s get to the synopsis. We do around the year thousand. Deep North of Europe. After his wounded father, King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke) ritually nominated him (caution William Dafoe who appears in the cave) to the succession, little Amleth can only guess at the father’s murder at the hands of his brother Uncle Fjolnir (Claes Bang, the Danish interpreter of The Square) and the uncle’s mating with mother Gundur (Nicole Kidman, then we also talk about how Nicole’s face shrunk). Obviously, Fjölnir has no sane intentions with his nephew, though he mates with his sister-in-law to such an extent that Amleth is forced to flee, little baby, alone on a boat. He’ll return to screens, let’s do it about fifteen years later, pretty muscular and swollen, snarling and howling like a wolf, in the company of other fierce half-naked warriors conquering poor Christ’s villages and fortresses. Amleth steals from a chat from others the location of Uncle Fjolnir’s new small kingdom, pretending to be a slave among slaves and ending up as a passenger to sail far away (we should have arrived in Iceland), where he eventually will only work as a slave in the service of his uncle, Mother Gundur and her Viking henchmen.
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Vengeance is served cold and puffed up, model for evil spirits operating in the dark of night, even with the help of fellow slave Olga – in another moment unfortunately hilariously defined “with a Valkyrie’s hair on a Slavic bitch”. Now it is clear that Eggers shared the screenplay with the screenwriter and Icelandic poet Sjon, attempts to infiltrate the most classic epic-adventurous dimension with that horror-mystery we’ve grown accustomed to from previous films (notably The Witch) to which is added another raw, realistic day-to-day life of the time. Bruised noses, eviscerations, severed heads, beatings, skinning and monstrous wounds coupled with a lack of empathy and relationship between the protagonists. In the sense that Eggers focuses every creative effort on the evocative level, leaving the descriptive to sordid backgrounds and references to bizarre practices (like a destructive and bloody cricket vs. rugby team match). So the feeling is like everything is falling from above onto the stage (where in the hut do I put the dog, what do I hold the slave’s hand, how do I make someone die or the other) and it gets onto the stage posed, and it’s framed in an unconventional and eccentric way to alert us to mysterious, hidden meanings of terror and violence that, apart from being repeated in an extended mother scene, never near real climax.
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The Northman it’s a film unspoken, impaled, deadlocked, standing on a stillness that one might want to sell as deeply authorial, but which poses in a banal, mocking, and superficial manner. Taylor-Joy’s pubic bone or Skarsgard’s bottom aren’t enough to (not only) lift the spirits. Not to mention the fantastic dream sequences between oracles and valkyries, reminiscent of the aesthetic of a Terry Gilliam, Monty Python version, and the more “experimental” moments of The Neverending Story (which is also a beautiful film). In The Northman there is no flab, no allure, no hype and no unfathomable passion for cinema. Kidman’s terrifying face could be the subject of a thousand jokes or an educational documentary on the harms of plastic surgery. However, we can say that in some moments and in precise shots, not to mention the monologue under the finale, maddened by amateur drama, the Kidman turned out to be both in the light and in the shadows in the face of Giovanna Ralli and Angela Lansbury, but not Kidman , which we knew from Rebellious Hearts or Days of Thunder.