The American director Robert Eggers established himself as a singular cinematic voice with the chilling Seventeenth-century “New England Folktale” The Witch, and adopted it up with The Lighthouse, an immersive dream of mermaids and homicide. Each films had an environment you could possibly style, and made virtues of their comparatively low budgets, conjuring expansive worlds from meagre sources.
Enter The Northman, a Viking epic, its funds reportedly in extra of $70m, that comes on like a head-smashing mashup of Beowulf, Hamlet (Eggers and Shakespeare share a Scandinavian legend supply) and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising, informed in growly tones which are extra Darkish Knight than Inexperienced Knight. Co-written with Icelandic poet Sjón, and described by Eggers as an try and make “the definitive Viking film”, it’s as bold as it’s preposterous and, at instances, ponderous – full of garbled epithets about vengeance and destiny which are whispered, muttered, or blood-curdlingly yelled. It is a story of youngsters “born of savagery”, through which tormented males spurn happiness to dive into icy waters searching for a battle, whereas mothers-to-be howl like banshees on the gods; a narrative with chapters that happen “Years Later”, and that lead us to “The Gates of Hell”. Understatement shouldn’t be on the menu.
We open within the Orkney/Shetland-adjacent fictional kingdom of Hrafnsey in AD895, Right here, King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) is murdered by his half-brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang) in entrance of his younger son, Amleth (Oscar Novak), who then witnesses his mom, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), being carried off screaming. “I’ll avenge you father; I’ll prevent mom; I’ll kill you Fjölnir!” turns into the battle cry of Amleth, who grows as much as turn into an iron-hearted berserker, performed with muscular vulnerability by Alexander Skarsgård, within the land of Rus. A powerful prolonged shot (certainly one of many) tracks an intoxicated raid on a Slavic village, delivering axes in heads (characters in The Northman are recognized by lacking components of their faces) as poultry flap within the background amid Pythonesque mud.
An encounter with a visionary seeress (an elaborately headdressed Björk) units Amleth on a roundabout course to Iceland, branding himself a slave as a way to infiltrate his uncle’s circle. On arrival, he headbutts a person to a pulp whereas enjoying a sport that appears like a cross between quidditch and rollerball, thereby profitable the approval of his estranged mom, who’s now residing with Fjölnir. It’s an association she appears to take pleasure in, though Amleth is aware of she’s simply performing – and there’s a lot of performing in The Northman: some pouty, some scowly, some beefy, some shouty – all delivered within the movie’s often ridiculous Nordic-sounding English language (shades of The Final Duel’s accent salads). Amleth additionally acquires an Arthurian-style blade that may solely be unsheathed below foretold circumstances, and groups up with Olga (The Witch’s breakout star, Anya Taylor-Pleasure), who tells him: “Your energy breaks males’s bones. I’ve the crafty to interrupt their minds.”
Eggers has at all times had an astute eye for that unusual crossover between this world and the following, mixing earthy tactility with otherworldly desires in impressively matter-of-fact vogue. That high quality is to the fore in The Northman, which at instances jogged my memory of the residing comic-book aesthetic of Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City, not least when the monochrome noir of night-time exteriors is damaged by the golden glow of firelit interiors – a key motif.
But for all its visible coups (breathtaking surroundings, evocatively captured by cinematographer Jarin Blaschke) and multilayered soundtrack (composers Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough place us proper there within the panorama), there’s one thing oddly plodding about Amleth’s bloody mission. Whereas the Norns-of-fate narrative might contrive a number of reversals of fortune and sympathy, there’s little of the genuinely uncanny weirdness that made Eggers’s first two options such a deal with. What insanity lies herein shouldn’t be of the north-northwest selection however extra in line with the bonkers blockbuster spectacle of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.
In final week’s Observer, Eggers spoke of the stress to ship “the most entertaining Robert Eggers movie I could make”. Maybe unsurprisingly, the end result feels uncharacteristically acquainted because it marauds towards a closing act pitched someplace between Conan the Barbarian and Anakin’s final moments from Revenge of the Sith, with only a trace of the manly hearth wrestling of Girls in Love. The top end result might fortunately play on a double invoice with both Zardoz or Thor. Whether or not that can show a energy or a weak spot with the all-important multiplex audiences stays to be seen.
