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THE NORTHMAN Robert Eggers is a prodigious American director committed to deep dives into the eerie past. His debut The Witch was about hapless Puritans facing dark forces in 1700s New England; The Lighthouse was steeped in 19th-century maritime madness. Now Eggers has gone back to the age of Icelandic sagas. A Viking revenge tale, The Northman is his biggest film yet, vaulting onto a huge visionary scale and showing a tendency to Kubrickian perfectionism and grandeur – although it’s moot whether this film more closely resembles Kubrick or Leni Riefenstahl.
Set in the ninth century, The Northman retells the original Hamlet story that inspired Shakespeare. Alexander Skarsgård plays Amleth, a prince turned ferocious Berserker warrior determined to avenge his murdered father (Ethan Hawke) and kill the man (Claes Bang) who married his mother Gudrun (Nicole Kidman). Amleth ruthlessly pursues his bloody mission, while enjoying a romantic idyll with a Slavic woman, Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy). The supernatural plays a part too: a raging Valkyrie, an undead warrior, the prophecies of a blind shaman (a balefully intoning Björk).
Revenge is a dish best served bold: Alexander Skarsgård inViking epic The Northman
AIDAN MONAGHAN / © 2021 FOCUS FEATURES, LLC
This kind of project inescapably runs the risk of being seen as hokum – which is no doubt why Eggers has loaded the film with scholarly seriousness (lines in Old Norse and Slavic, amid Nordic-accented English dialogue) and given it a spectacular visual polish. Jarin Blaschke’s photography, mixing bursts of colour in among tones of earth and metal, has an extraordinary textured sheen, making The Northman seem not just a film but a rigorously architectured monument. The result demands a leap of faith, and many viewers will happily make it, but the grandiose mythification of the war impulse and male violence sit oddly with today’s cultural mood. The Northman may not be fascistic by intent, but it more than flirts with an iconography that’s uncomfortably, let’s say, Wagnerian. Its magnificence is undoubted, but The Northman is hard to love – unless you’re really committed to the whole damn Götterdämmerung thing.