The Northman Review: Robert Eggers’s Programmatic Blast from a Viking Past

Robert Eggers’s The Northman doesn’t lack for blood and guts, but it doesn’t play enough in the well of the weird.

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The Northman
Photo: Aidan Monaghan/Focus Features

Robert Eggers’s feature films up to this point have been marked by a sharp focus on the uneasy relationship between the eerily isolated environments in which they’re set and the lost souls who populate them. Drawing on his background as a production designer, Eggers meticulously recreates remote settings from another time that reflect his characters’ frenzied states of mind. The filmmaker now widens his view significantly in The Northman, a grandiose Viking saga that traverses vast Icelandic terrains and takes with it a cast of characters substantially larger than that of The Witch and The Lighthouse combined.

The film tells the tale of Amleth, a Viking prince fated to avenge his father’s murder. We first meet Amleth, a figure from Scandinavian legend who inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as a boy (Oscar Novak), ecstatic upon the brief return home of his father, King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), from war overseas. But in the midst of a bonding session where father and son howl at each other like wolves (as in The Lighthouse, flatulence is a means of asserting dominance here), Aurvandil is killed by his jealous brother, Fjölnir (Claes Bang), who then decimates Aurvandil’s kingdom and kidnaps Amleth’s mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman).

Years after his narrow escape into the wilderness, Amleth (now played by Alexander Skarsgård) is part of a Viking tribe that raids small villages across Slavic countrysides. The preternaturally skilled and ripped warrior plows through his opponents with merciless ease, with Eggers gleefully fetishizing the hyperreal action in a way that has become de rigueur in the years since the orgiastic, CGI-forward tango of bloodletting that is Zack Snyder’s 300 was released.

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But Amleth is no heartless savage. While his Viking cohorts taunt and terrorize the women and children that they conquer, Amleth sits forlornly off to the side—the resident sad boy of the group who broods over a past that has brought him to a despicable way of life. Amleth, though, is reminded of his long-ago vow to himself—“I will avenge you, Father. I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir”—upon learning that the captives from his most recent raid are being sent to work on a farm in Iceland that’s owned by none other than his duplicitous uncle.

While The Northman’s prototypical story happily pledges its allegiance to the cinematic tradition of the bluntly aggressive historical action epic, Eggers and co-writer Sjón marginally upend expectations in the initially subtle way that Amleth embarks on his mission. Ditching his Viking tribe, he arrives in Iceland to find Fjölnir and Gudrún presiding over their land with a new adolescent child between them, both failing to recognize Amleth as a grown man. And as he ingratiates himself into Fjölnir’s world by posing as a hardworking and loyal slave, the film morphs into something of a Norse spin on a domestic psychological thriller.

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Amleth faces constant harassment by Fjölnir’s boastful adult son, Thórir (Gustav Lindh), and you sense in Skarsgård’s fraught visage our hero’s struggle to unleash his awesome might. At its strongest, The Northman is fiercely focused on Amleth’s need to manage his own damage control—to channel it into something almost unfathomable. And so, by night, he sneaks about committing treacherous and violent acts to undermine his uncle’s hold on power. “I will haunt this farm like a hungry corpse back from the dead,” he hisses at one point.

This setup also allows Eggers to indulge in some gleefully gruesome shock tactics, like when the farm’s denizens awake to find the dismembered bodies of Thórir’s friends pinned to the side of a hut. A subsequent mass hallucination that causes Fjölnir’s lackeys to inflict harm on themselves further inches the film into the terrain of the supernatural, solidifying the vice grip of fear that constricts the homestead as Amleth skulks about like a ghostly agent of fate.

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It’s somewhat disappointing, then, that The Northman reveals itself to be so programmatic. Amleth eventually drops his ruse in order to save his love interest, the ethereal slave girl Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), kicking off a third act that proceeds through all the conventional beats of countless revenge fantasies. While still proficiently staged, this turn toward tradition serves to render a potentially singular experience into a relatively familiar one.

Similarly, The Northman’s landscape imagery feels like a step down for a filmmaker who once seemed intent on imbuing his settings with an unnerving sense of character, as in the forest clearing of The Witch and the seaside outpost of The Lighthouse. Yet while this film’s canvas is considerably broader, it feels as if its psychological chaos hasn’t expanded accordingly.

From Amleth’s meeting with an ominous seeress (Björk) all the way to the cryptic chapter titles that mark our hero’s journey, The Northman clearly aims to keep one foot in the realm of the enigmatic—and to maybe say something grand about life, death, and fate along the away. But unlike Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising, a Viking-age head trip that’s steadfastly committed to its vibe of abstract expressionism, Eggers’s film is sometimes frustratingly shackled to the obligations of plot. It doesn’t lack for blood and guts, but it doesn’t play enough in the well of the weird, and missing here is that haunting sense of the elemental and oneness between people and place that animates The Witch and The Lighthouse.

Score: 
 Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Ethan Hawke, Anya Taylor-Joy, Gustav Lindh, Elliott Rose, Willem Dafoe, Phill Martin, Eldar Skar, Olwen Fouéré, Edgar Abram, Jack Gassmann, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Oscar Novak, Jack Walsh, Björk  Director: Robert Eggers  Screenwriter: Robert Eggers, Sjón  Distributor: Focus Features  Running Time: 136 min  Rating: R  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Mark Hanson

Mark Hanson is a film writer and curator from Toronto, Canada, and the product manager at Bay Street Video, one of North America's last remaining video stores.

1 Comment

  1. I like this review.
    “While still proficiently staged, this turn toward tradition serves to render a potentially singular experience into a relatively familiar one.”
    Any ideas for an alternative route it could have taken?

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