The Northman (2022)
A visceral, violent
vignette of Viking vengeance that’s sure to entertain
- 4/5 Cameras 🎥🎥🎥🎥
- Starring: Alexander Skarsgard, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicole Kidman, et al
- Directed by: Robert Eggers
- Where to find it: In select cinemas now
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When I saw Robert Eggers’ was making a (relatively) big-budget
Viking epic I was surprised; his track record to date consists of The Witch, a
highly effective folk horror set in the time of the first pilgrims landing in the
USA, and The Lighthouse, a tight and strange but thoroughly engaging story
about two men going crazy in a lighthouse. To go from those brilliant, but
small features to a film with the scale and ambition of this seemed crazy to me
but needless to say I was intrigued. Loosely based on the story of Amleth, the
tale that also inspired Hamlet, The Northman recently got its wide release, but
is it worth the price of admission?
The film opens with a Viking king played by Ethan Hawke
returning from a season of raiding where he prepares his young son Amleth for
his future ascension to kinghood just in time for him to be murdered by his
brother (Claes Bang). Years later Amleth has grown to become a fearsome Viking
berserker (Alexander Skarsgard) and after a chat with a witch (Bjork), he
decides it’s time to set off to avenge his father and rescue his mother (Nicole
Kidman) who his uncle had taken as his bride following his episode of
fratricide.
From that brief description of the basic plot, it probably
comes as no surprise that this is far from a cheerful film. Most of the film
carries a grim aesthetic. The world it creates feels lived in and dirty in a
way that comes across as authentic, though in some of its more mystic moments
the creators show a real eye for beauty with some truly stunning visuals that
live up to Eggers’ arthouse reputation. This leads to a film that’s very
engaging to look at. This engagement is helped by some great performances with
Alexander Skarsgard doing a stellar job as the titular Northman managing to
bring a sizeable amount of brutality without ever turning the audience against
him. His first big moment sees him at the front of a raid and is one of the
most badass action scenes I’ve seen in a long time. Elsewhere the cast features
a lot of big names with Willem Dafoe, Bjork, Ethan Hawke, and more playing
small but significant parts while Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, and Anya
Taylor-Joy all get larger roles. Each does fine work particularly Nicole Kidman
when she reunites with her son though I felt Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays Olga a
Slavic mystic and slave, could have been given a bit more to do.
Plot-wise I can’t say The Northman does anything special,
the narrative relies heavily on the age-old trope of destiny for any of it to
really work at all which I find is often a fairly lazy motif, but it mostly
serves its purpose. Personally, I’d have done away with one or two of the less
ambiguous magical elements to leave the film a little more grounded as well as
give it a slightly tighter run time but I didn’t find them so egregious as to
ruin my enjoyment which in this case is based largely on the look and feel of
the film rather than its story. It’s a big, loud, chaotic film packed full of
violence yet it manages to retain some of the intimacy of Eggers’ previous work
in its quieter moments, helped by some pretty great period-inspired dialogue. It’s an intense ride and I’m sure it’s not for
everyone but for those looking for something authentic and fresh, or perhaps
just those looking for a more arthouse Viking version of Gladiator, The
Northman has an awful lot to offer.
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