The Northman is Robert Eggers’ most elaborate film to date. That’s saying something for a guy who made both The Witch and The Lighthouse, two of the most gorgeously presented films in recent memory with an incredible amount of detail stitched into every frame. And while his typically fine-tuned storytelling falls prey to cliché here, The Northman more than makes up for it in terms of sheer scale and the amount of raw ferocity on display, alongside a healthy heaping of Eggers’ textbook weirdness. For fans of Eggers this is another feather in the cap of one of the most exciting directors working today, and for newcomers this is by far his most accessible film to date.
After witnessing the brutal murder of his father, King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), at the hands of his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang) as a child, a vengeance-fuelled Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) sets out on a brutal quest across Iceland to avenge his father, save his kidnapped mother Gudrún (Nicole Kidman) and his bring his uncle to justice once and for all. Along the way he must contend with visions of the Gods, shocking revelations and an unexpected relationship with Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), a slave claiming to be a witch, who holds the potential to free Amleth from the lust for revenge slowly tearing him apart.
On a story level it might be easy to pigeonhole The Northman alongside similar genre fare like Gladiator and Braveheart; after all it operates as a fairly straightforward revenge mission with few genuine surprises along the way, but to do so would be to diminish a truly exciting and technically masterful film. Each frame feels so carefully put together, with no secret being made of Eggers’ deep commitment to realism and historical accuracy, and while that doesn’t do anything to make up for the blander elements of the story, it does create a visually stunning and immersive world that envelopes you in Amleth’s story.
The places where Eggers does steer his story into the more mythological is where it separates itself from its peers, with hypnotic, hallucinatory sequences of Gods and Soothsayers guiding Amleth along his sacred quest. These scenes will certainly not be to everyone’s tastes, but make for a much richer exploration of the society at the time that Eggers so clearly cares for, providing context for the intense, almost zealot-like commitment to family loyalty that drives Amleth.
Eggers’ terrific eye for visual flair extends to the action scenes, most of which operate as mesmerising one-shot sequences, with the camera panning and spinning around brutal scenes of violence. The harsh, unforgiving world that Amleth operates in extends to these sequences, and Skarsgård imbues his character with a tremendous physicality as he detaches from reality in a blind fury for his opponents. It’s a performance that doesn’t require much in the way of Eggers’ usual complex, period-specific dialogue, but is no less affecting in the raw physicality and heaving body movements that Skarsgård is constantly performing as the perpetually enraged berserker.
More so than Eggers’ other works, The Northman takes aim at the topic of toxic masculinity and how an unchecked commitment to it can erode a person’s very being; with only the presence of Olga able to lift Amleth from his increasingly animalistic ambitions. It’s a no-holds barred, extremely literal approach to tackling the theme, leaving very little to the imagination as you see experience the violent trail of death Amleth leaves in his path in his quest to fulfil his father’s dying wish.
As the story progresses though and certain secrets are revealed, you get the sense that Eggers is attempting to unpack more, but is held back by his inability to waver from where the story must naturally go. It’s a last ditch attempt to expand beyond the point he is trying to make to finally get the audience truly on-side with Amleth – who had up until that point been more of a walking, revenge-fuelled vehicle of violence than a fully developed character – that sadly gets lost in the beats the film has to hit to succeed. An unfortunate sacrifice, but in a world this brutal, sometimes they simply have to be made.
The Northman is a blood-soaked journey through Viking history told through Robert Eggers’ extremely unique, punctilious sensibilities that opens his style up to a much wider audience whilst retaining the visual opulence that fans have come to love. The genre trappings and the limitations of the somewhat basic story being told do the film an injustice at times, limiting our ability to fully connect with the characters in a way not seen in his work before, but the sheer technical achievement of it all combined with the obvious passion on-screen make this a ridiculously entertaining and memorable watch nonetheless. Charge to the cinema to see it.
The Northman stars Alexander Skarsgård, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Willem Dafoe, Gustav Lindh, Eldar Skar & Björk – In cinemas now.