Robert Eggers' The Northman offers Shakespearean drama wrapped in Old Norse vengeance
The director of The Witch and The Lighthouse works on his biggest canvas yet for a brutal, beautiful tale of vengeance
By the time the sumptuous and gnarly Viking revenge odyssey The Northman arrives at its “Gates of Hell” finale—a stupendously composed scene in which two bare, beastly and bloodthirsty men lunge and growl at each other on the skirts of an active volcano—you might wonder how many movies you have already watched to get to that point in director Robert Eggers’ violence-soaked fever dream. The answer is too many to count.
In other words, The Northman is an unapologetic, non-stop adventure that dispenses everything, everywhere, all at once. From Icelandic family sagas to Norse legends to supernatural myths, Eggers plays with the rich material at his disposal with a wide-eyed enthusiasm that’s both disarming and awe-inspiring. His approach feels a little bit like he knows it’s his one and only shot to make a film that should—or at least could—become one of the greatest examples of its kind, a Shakespearean drama wrapped in Old Norse vengeance. He evidences this laudable (if not overeager) commitment in every detail of the 136-minute epic, including spilled guts, sliced up human flesh, and spliced corpses, as well as an animalistic performance by Swedish heartthrob Alexander Skarsgård, who beefed up his muscle mass to play the merciless, score-settling Prince Amleth.
As a child in the fictitious island kingdom of Hrafnsey, Amleth’s warrior king father Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke, in a short but memorable part) inaugurates his son as his tribe’s future ruler in a psychedelic ceremony witnessed by the mad-eyed Heimir the Fool (a delirious Willem Dafoe). Amleth’s uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang) soon murders his father and kidnaps his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman, in an increasingly substantial part of escalating wrath). But by the time Amleth becomes an adult, he has long forgotten his vow to avenge his father and rescue his mother, consumed instead by wreaking havoc on defenseless Slavic villages as a Viking.
It’s eventually the prophet Seeress (Björk, making her first non-Matthew Barney-related appearance on screen since Dancer In The Dark) who reminds Amleth of his familial mission, prompting him to blend in with Slavic slaves on the ship where he meets his romantic and intellectual match, the stonily alluring Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy). After the film’s single moment of quiet—a gleamingly lensed coital scene between him and Olga—Amleth invades his uncle’s farm and begins to uncover deeper truths behind his father’s murder. A sequence of high-octane drama ensues between mother and son, as Kidman and Skarsgård stage the most bizarre Big Little Lies reunion imaginable.