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‘The Northman’ Review: The heaviest and most brutal masterpiece you’ll see all year

Northman
Aidan Monaghan /Focus Features

Robert Eggers’ films typically operate on two levels, with the aesthetic stylization of the genre he’s working in serving to compliment whatever larger story he’s trying to tell. Unlike his former labelmate Ari Aster, I don’t see this as a concession made in order to secure funding, as Eggers follows ideas and imagery he’s intrigued by to interesting ends. Like the best examples of the genre, The VVitch used its folk horror trappings to explore a deeper and richer family drama about religious fundamentalism, where a pious father reaps what he sows after he estranges his family from their puritan community (I also don’t see it as an example of “Good for her” horror cinema, as the meme goes, but that’s because I find the tragedy angle to be more dramatically compelling). The Lighthouse, on the other hand, took the aesthetics of silent-film era surrealism, paired with Lovecraftian high weirdness, and applied them to the conventions of the buddy comedy, and there were few cinematic delights as genuinely charming as when audiences discovered that they could, you know, laugh at the movie and were intended to by the filmmaker. His latest film, the Viking epic The Northman, works similarly, though it’s a little harder to tell than in his prior work.

At its core, The Northman is a relatively simple story, almost entirely summed up by the chant that young Viking prince Amleth (Oscar Novak) shouts as he rows away from the ruin of his father’s kingdom: “I will avenge you, father. I will rescue you, mother. I will kill you, Fjolnir.” If the name “Amleth” sounds familiar to you, it’s perhaps because it sounds like “Hamlet,” from which Eggers and his co-writer, the Icelandic poet Sjon, seem to have derived some manner of influence. Regicide is the inciting incident: After returning from a raid, King Aurvandeil (Ethan Hawke) is murdered by his brother, the “Fjolnir” (Claes Bang) of the chant, in front of his son, with the boy’s mother, Queen Gudrun (Nicole Kidman) seized as property along with his holdings. The child knows his life is in danger and flees to the sea. But we get enough glimpses of the peaceful life of young Amleth to make the pain of his angst feel righteous when it comes time for him to pay the piper — Eggers presents to us a Viking ritual where the King and his son engage in a hallucinogenic rite of passage, acting like dogs and wolves and learning from the court jester (Willem Dafoe), dressed out in medieval fetish wear, the family’s legacy, visualized through a gorgeous CGI physical representation of a genealogical tapestry: Kings connected to the trunk and its branches via umbilical cords, ties that bind them to the history of their people at large. As long as he remains alive, Amleth’s connection to his family remains unbroken, and his fate is his own to make.

Flash-forward a few decades later: Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard) is All Growns Up, a heaving mass of single-minded muscle, fighting under the banner of a raiding band of more “traditional” Vikings. Clothed in animal skins and screaming bloody murder, they sack, loot, kill, maim, rape, massacre, and sell whoever’s leftover into slavery. Well, Amleth doesn’t do some of those things, because he retains some aspects of the high-birthed child he once was back in the day — he refuses to harm women or children, and takes some manner of pity for those he’s conquered — but Eggers is keen to point out that this era fucking sucked to live in, almost as a way of counteracting the immense amount of fantasizing that certain folks do about living in a culture long past that they’ve romanticized beyond all recognition. “Nasty, brutish and short” doesn’t even begin to cut it: One is always moments away from being led away from all they’ve known by horrible men wielding iron, the great mead hall, that you used to celebrate minor triumphs in, slowly burning, as the screams of everyone not fit enough cross an ocean and then to labor in the fields in some minor fiefdom echo about until they, like the blazing building, slow to a steady smolder. This is what Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy) experiences at the hands of Amleth’s band. She tries to strike back against them, however she can, but she’s quickly taken away with the rest of the slaves, branded, and put on a boat headed for Iceland.

It’s then that, following a premonition from a witch (Bjork) in the husk of the hall, Amleth discovers that the ship Olga’s being taken to is headed for Fjolnir’s land, and the intervening years haven’t been kind to him, at least when it comes to matters of personal property: He owns a tiny hamlet, out in the rolling green hills, eeking out a small living with Gudrun, their children, assorted villagers and plenty of slaves. He brands himself, cuts his flowing hair, and sneaks aboard the ship to fulfill his quest, which has taken on a somewhat mythic status, seemingly encouraged by the Gods themselves, who, like in The VVitch, are a distant but very real presence in the world of these characters, who have taken a keen interest in this quest for vengeance, though they move in mysterious ways. At its intellectually and aesthetically purest form, The Northman is a loving tribute to the fascination that we’ve had with the Vikings over the decades, exploring why their legends endure and their culture remains of endless curiosity and speculation while grappling with the reality of their terror, all unfolding atop landscapes so gorgeous and varied in their topography that it’s often surprising. The lands aren’t all ice and snow: there are peaceful green hills, covered in rock; volcanos spitting fire into the air; and lush forests, full of life.

The answer to the question posed in the previous paragraph can be found in that second aspect of The Northman‘s operation: It’s just so fucking metal, dude. “Badass” doesn’t even quite cut it here, because it’s much more intense than that. There are names and sayings in this movie that will be lifted by a thousand bands in need of something badass to go by when they play their first shows, and you can practically hear the Sludge to Come leaking out of the pipes of time itself as the film unreels. One typically has to rotoscope images that rips this hard — be it in Heavy Metal, Fire and Ice or The Spine of Night — or try their hardest to resist studio temptation to make things more palatable. But Eggers has retained almost all of the key aspects of his style here, with his warm fire-lit interiors and bleak panoramas adding to the fury of the bloodshed. It’s another notch in the belt of my theory that the best fantasy directors, be it Boorman or Scott or Jackson, were at one point successful horror filmmakers, with their cinematic understanding of the uncanny easing the transition between varying forms of the sublime and terrible. His action is vicious and bloody, with practical effects used where possible (I will not hold it against any filmmaker for using the occasional bit of CGI blood splatter when they’re doing a fucking 10-minute tracking shot featuring two hundred extras engaged in hand-to-hand combat), and you will notice when exactly his horror expertise comes into play — mangled corpses, et cetera. It’s just so overwhelmingly cool, hitting at the perfect intersection of cinephile, history nerd, Tomb Mold listener and fantasy fan quadrants on a hypothetical interests chart.

But what’s so amazing and essential about The Northman is how populist and accessible it is to any viewer who buys a ticket while Eggers also retains so much of what makes him such a unique and interesting director. There’s been a quote circulating about where the director’s talking about how a viewer at a test screening told him that they needed a PHD in Viking history in order to understand the film, and I can say without a doubt: If you didn’t need to have read The Lord of the Rings before sitting down and watching Fellowship back in ’01, you’ll likely have a similar experience. It’s a revenge tale masterfully told, simple in its visceral pleasures but with more complex aesthetic and thematic notes left to discover if you want to. Though I’m sure that many enterprising young minds will become super curious about this, steeped in Norse mythology-adjacent fantasy like the Thor films and the most recent God of War video game, I’m equally sure that lots of folks will be pleased to discover the film doesn’t require you to see get an advanced degree in order to enjoy it for what it is. It is, in essence, the ideal form of the Major Label Debut: With real-ass capital behind them, some folks conform to the mean and produce bland and meaningless art, others go excessively ambitious and alienate everyone around them, and every so often, you’ll find an artist who knows how to manage their large-scale fantasies and give them life. The Northman is just that sort of masterpiece.