To say that The Northman, the third film from writer-director Robert Eggers, is more conventional than The Lighthouse and The Witch is not to say that it’s conventional. The movie may be a familiar period revenge drama in terms of narrative, but it’s made—as the other films were—with blistering cinematic vision.
To what end, however? The Witch dissected religious fundamentalism; The Lighthouse examined the madness of isolation. (That one especially hits differently in the wake of the COVID pandemic.) The Northman throws a few wrinkles into its vengeance story, but doesn’t offer up much food for thought. This is mostly a visual extravaganza of gritty historical detail, mythic imagination, and brutally horrific violence.
Alexander Skarsgard stars as Amleth, dispossessed prince of a Nordic realm circa AD 900, who is hacking his way home to avenge his dethroned father (a convincingly burly Ethan Hawke in flashbacks). Bulked-up and brutish, Skarsgard stands as a worthy successor to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian, delivering a performance of impressive physical prowess (while avoiding the campiness). Returning from The Witch is Anya Taylor-Joy as an enslaved woman who brings “cunning”—to borrow her own character’s words—to Amleth’s cause. More star power arrives in the form of Nicole Kidman as Amleth’s icily regal mother.
Eggers wrote the screenplay with Sjon, the Icelandic writer whose credits include the 2021 folk horror curiosity Lamb and Lars von Trier’s Bjork-starring movie musical Dancer in the Dark (Bjork has a cameo here as an elaborately adorned seer). What we get is a little Hamlet, but mostly a series of stunning set pieces. Eggers is a ritualistic filmmaker. Research drives his films, which play out as equal parts “living-history” reenactments and flights of fantastical imagination. And so we have an opening sequence of Hawke’s king and a young Amleth (Oscar Novak) barking like dogs as part of a wild initiation rite (“This is the last tear you will shed in weakness”); a Viking funeral punctuated with a shocking moment of sacrifice; an (imagined?) ride into the Northern lights with a Valkyrie; and—my favorite—a fireside prophecy involving Willem Dafoe’s lopped-off head. (That’s not really a spoiler.) When Eggers roots these moments in solid characters and sophisticated stories, they’re thrillingly immersive. When that foundation isn’t there, they can register as high-priced cosplay.
The Northman gestures toward complication with its ending, a striking silhouette showdown set against a backdrop of flowing lava. It’s riveting as action, yet the choice Amleth must make, which was predicted by Bjork’s seer, fails to deconstruct the notion of mythical heroism in any real way. (For that, see 2021’s The Green Knight.) Similarly, for all its grandiloquent landscape cinematography (Eggers regular Jarin Blaschke is behind the camera), the movie never tempers its barbarism with beauty or mercy, as was the case in something like Leonardo DiCaprio’s vengeful The Revenant. But for a rousing adventure yarn about screaming Norsemen, made by filmmakers who love to costume them, you could do far worse.
(4/21/2022)
