"The Northman": Avenge. Save. Kill.
Nobody nose, the trouble he's seen.
[First Published: April 28, 2022]
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Today’s film is NOT for the faint of heart. Anyone even vaguely aware of Viking history, Norse mythology, or the culture of the nordic nations in the early centuries AD will undoubtedly make known their brutality. Robert Eggers’s third film, The Northman, pulls zero punches in brutally showcasing the violence. Eggers is known for creating immersive dark and meticulously crafted set films, such as The Witch and The Lighthouse. His latest outing departs from the minimalist sets and stories of the former two and straight into an action epic, which takes place in and centers around a young prince (Alexander Skarsgård) who, after witnessing the death of his father (Ethan Hawke), dedicates his life to vengeance. The cast also includes Nicole Kidman (Queen Gudurún), Willem Dafoe (Heimir The Fool), Anya Taylor-Joy (Olga of the Birch Forest), Claes Bang (Fjölnir The Brotherless), and Björk (Seeress).
The film is an engrossing cinematic experience, offering brutal spurts of action and intense moments of battle amidst the slower-paced drama. It is a very dirty, bloody, and visceral hypermasculine movie. Eggers crafts a visual and auditory masterclass with rhythmic drums, and vast expanses of Baltic backcountry rich with historical intrigue, ensuring the audience is wholly immersed in both the period and psychology of the characters. Speaking of characters, Amleth (Skarsgård), the film’s protagonist, is full of rage and hate for the atrocities committed against his family. While the story is eerily similar to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I found myself unable to connect with the narrative. The familiar beats of any revenge storyline remained unchallenged. Due to the exhaustive nature of such narrative choices, my emotional investment with the story is never fully engaged.
Revenge films take a particular shape. In The Northman, the atmosphere, time period, and technical manipulation are the driving factors for the film's high points, not the storyline. The plot is difficult to follow because Eggers enjoys inserting mythological and spiritual elements that elicit more questions than answers. I did appreciate the choice to keep everything realistic, which elevates the emotional elements to a compelling level. This film has some incredible hand-to-hand combat sequences similar to last week's review. However, dissimilarly from Everything Everywhere All at Once, which fell into the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style of movie fighting, The Northman elects for a more realistic set of brutish combat scenes, much more analogous to The Revenant.
To call this movie an action epic is both underselling and overselling it. It is Eggers’s most accessible film, using the familiar structure of a revenge narrative to deliver surreal cosmic imagery and brief brushes with the fantastical before returning to that Shakespearean tragedy that we all know and love. More accurately, The Northman is familiar and satisfying as a revenge story and simultaneously baffling and beguiling. But for all the visions of a cackling, eye-less Bjork, skeletal warriors that spring to life, or blue-eyed gods who scream in triumph as they ride through the skies, the film never quite delivers as similar films such as Gladiator, The Lord of the Rings, and Braveheart. Yet, the story simultaneously feels like an age-old mythic tale that has emerged from the bowels of the Earth — compounded by the film's bellowing, disembodied introduction, the visions of ghostly ancestors hanging from trees, the frequent flirtations with witchcraft — and like a grim, grounded war movie, in which the battle scenes play out in a slow, weighty, almost plodding manner, meticulously choreographed to be as barbaric and realistic as possible. The film's gray, grimy color palette adds to this natural approach, so palpable that it seeps over into the occasional flashes of the fantastical.
When the film meets between these two modes — the mythic and the realistic — it is at its most thrilling. Early on, in a scene where Hawke's King Aurvandil and his supernaturally-gifted fool Heimir induct Amleth into manhood through some kind of primal ritual where the three of them howl and snarl like wolves within a dimly lit cavern, it feels like The Northman has tapped into some terrifying beyond that feels unpredictable, unfathomable, and better left untouched. Sometimes the film walks this balance precariously, potentially alienating its audience with these more eerie touches, but that is when it feels truest to Eggers's vision of The Northman, whatever it may be.