The Northman

As I was watching it, I couldn’t help but notice the similarity in names between Prince Amleth, the hero of The Northman, and a certain other famous prince in world literature, namely Hamlet. As the story began to unfold in the new film from director Robert Eggers, who brought us the deeply researched and meticulously crafted films The Witch and The Lighthouse, I saw other similarities. There is a king who is betrayed and slain by his own brother. The young prince, his mother taken as a spoil of victory by the new king, vows revenge on his treacherous uncle.

I thought that Eggers and his cowriter, the Icelandic poet, novelist, and lyricist who goes by Sjón, might have taken inspiration from the Bard for their tale of Nordic kings and Viking berserkers. Turns out – as I’m sure more than a few of you already knew – that I had it backwards. It was Shakespeare who took inspiration from young Amleth for his own Prince of Denmark. As I should have suspected after seeing his first two films, Eggers took inspiration for his movie from and adapted the 13th century version of the Nordic legend of Amleth as memorialized by Saxo Grammaticus, in his Gesta Danorum.

Eggers’s effort shares similarities with a few other recent adaptations of centuries-old stories. Like 2021’s The Green Knight from David Lowry and (speaking of Shakespeare) The Tragedy of Macbeth from Joel Coen, this triptych of films takes inspiration from ancient traditions of storytelling. Like Knight and Macbeth, The Northman completely revitalizes its source tale, bursting to life on screen. Eggers has made something akin to George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. Like that film, The Northman is pure cinema. Its propulsive use of visual storytelling is transfixing. The world Eggers has created feels utterly authentic.

The year is AD 895 and King Aurvandill has returned to his island kingdom after achieving victory in battle overseas. After a sacred ceremony in which the king prepares Prince Amleth for the day he must take the throne, Aurvandill’s brother, Fjölnir, leads an ambush, ultimately committing both fratricide and regicide. The last thing young Amleth witnesses before he flees his homeland by boat is Fjölnir carrying his screaming mother away as his new wife. Amleth resolves to avenge his father, save his mother, and kill Fjölnir.

One of my favorite fun facts about Robert Eggers’s staggering debut film, The Witch, is that the director brought in a thatcher and a carpenter who could build historically accurate huts for his movie’s New World, British colony setting. He also did the casting in England, in order to ensure accurate accents for characters newly arrived in Plymouth from Britain. It’s this meticulous attention to detail that makes Eggers’s films so fascinating to watch.

Viking culture gets the Eggers treatment in The Northman, to similarly spectacular effect. As in The Witch, Eggers masterfully blends in the superstitions that were predominant among the people on which the movie focuses. The director blurs the line between myth and reality by making everything on screen feel as accurate as possible in depicting Viking culture and living conditions, while also treating that culture’s religious beliefs as rooted in reality. The resulting fantastical tale feels like it’s being spun by a Viking poet sitting near a fire, a snowstorm raging all around him.

It's also interesting to note that in both The Green Knight and The Tragedy of Macbeth, the filmmakers of those movies prioritized opening up centuries-old tales to diverse casting, which made them all the better for it. Dev Patel as Sir Gawain and Denzel Washington as Lord Macbeth overturned, to magnificent effect, the tradition of white actors dominating these kinds of roles.

Robert Eggers’s obsession with period accuracy probably meant that he never even considered casting anyone but the most Nordic looking actors for his movie. I have no reason to believe Eggers had any agenda other than recreating this time and place in history with as much fidelity as possible. Still, it gives one pause to realize, halfway through screening The Northman, that it’s likely to become the new favorite movie of the Proud Boys and other white nationalists. They’ll no doubt use it in recruitment material and for countless movie nights. But that’s the fault of delusional bigots, not the good-faith efforts of the filmmakers to capture a very specific piece of long-ago human history.

Eggers and Sjón weave in one preoccupation of contemporary parents in the early minutes of The Northman. Amleth’s mother, Queen Gudrún, is concerned that the boy is too young to participate in the sacred ritual that Aurvandill insists he must. Aurvandill reminds his queen that his own father wasn’t much older than Amleth is now when he had to kill in order to ascend the throne. The idea that we want our children’s lives to be easier and better than our own is certainly a modern worry, but it’s undoubtedly a hope that parents have had for their children since before written record.

You can also see how our current culture is shaping what’s acceptable to show on screen when depicting brutish and violent cultures of long ago. The Northman revels in the graphic violence that must have been at least a part of everyday life for these people. The threat of rape is also implicit throughout the movie and it was also most likely an unavoidable fact of life for most women of this era.

Years after escaping and being trained as a Viking berserker, Amleth stows away on a slave ship that’s heading to his newly-transplanted uncle. Fjölnir is now in exile in Iceland after being overthrown by a usurper. The women who have been enslaved all know that any man who rules over them can do whatever he pleases with them.

Yet the movie never traffics in graphic depictions of rape, seemingly because as a culture, we are making it more unacceptable to portray such a vile act as part of what is ostensibly an action-adventure tale. Depictions of rape on screen have their place, if sexual violence as a means of power and control in the society depicted is being critiqued, like in the recent television limited-series The Underground Railroad.

Aside from the brutal, but, critically, heightened violence – this is an unfair reduction, but if you squint, The Northman can look like an R-rated Thor movie, not in a bad way though and, obviously, sans the comic relief – Eggers delights in staging surreal and hallucinatory supernatural sequences throughout his movie.

I mean hallucinatory literally. In one sequence, Olga, the sorceress who Amleth meets on the slave ship and with whom he forms a special bond, surreptitiously feeds magic mushrooms to a group of their captors, so that Amleth can peel through them in the ensuing chaos.

There is also some top-notch psychedelic cinema during the sacred ritual in which Amleth goes through his royal rite of passage. Eggers reunites here with the inimitable Willem Dafoe, one of the stars of his bonkers 2019 effort, The Lighthouse. Dafoe is in top form. His character is both the court fool – the movie reminds us that the unique role of fool allowed someone in the royal entourage to speak truth to power, because it’s done under the guise of harmless entertainment – and (unknown to everyone but the king) also the mystical soothsayer who tests young Amleth.

Through no fault of Dafoe, the otherwise gripping and hypnotic soothsayer sequence had me giggling under my breath a little. The soothsayer sounds eerily similar to Gill, the character Dafoe voiced in the 2003 Pixar mega-hit Finding Nemo. During this sequence in The Northman, all I could think during the soothsayer’s rantings was, “Sharkbait! Hoo! Ha! Ha!”

Alexander Skarsgård is eye-wateringly ripped as the adult version of Amleth, on a mission for vengeance. We’re talking Magic Mike XXL-level ripped. This is one of those roles that leads men’s fitness magazines to write articles on Skarsgård’s workout routine in preparation for the role. The character is a bit one dimensional, but that’s sort of the point. Amleth has lived for a decade or more with the sole thought of avenging his father as his only North Star.

(During our first viewing of The Northman trailer, my wife turned to me and quietly asked, “So, they made an entire movie about Inigo Montoya?” She once again proved that her sardonic wit can cut right to the heart of movies in an instant in a way that I can’t.)

Nicole Kidman as Amleth’s mother, Queen Gudrún, isn’t given much to do until a key scene late in the film in which Gudrún lets her Lady Macbeth freak flag fly. Ethan Hawke is recognizable, only barely, as King Aurvandill War-Raven. His ragged, guttural voice is unlike anything I’ve ever heard Hawke attempt in a role.

The weird and wonderful singer Björk came out of acting retirement to portray the Seeress, a spectral entity who prophesizes to Amleth about the choice he must face when the time for his revenge comes to pass. Björk introduced Eggers to Sjón, and the film’s costume design team give her an unforgettable look for the three or so minutes she appears on screen.

The angelic Anya Taylor-Joy – who is stunning in Eggers’s debut feature film, The Witch – is hypnotic as Olga of the Birch Forest. Olga is the Slavic sorceress Amleth meets on the slave ship and with whom he forms a special bond. Since The Northman is based on an ur-Hamlet tale written over 800 years ago, it’s not a surprise that the female characters are given short shrift, but I really appreciated how much Amleth and Olga work as a team. There is a heartbreaking confession from Amleth late in the film when he professes his love for Olga: he has “never felt close to another person” like he feels close to her.

One slight critique I spotted in the days after screening The Northman, but before I sat down to wrestle with my own reaction to it, was questioning if Eggers’s meticulous attention to detail for his latest film offered up anything more interesting than a straightforward bit of revenge-focused entertainment. It might not, but his vision of Amleth wielding the deadly sword named Night Blade – the magical weapon can only be used between sunset and sunrise – was enough for me. The Northman is a rip-roaring piece of elemental storytelling that kept me transfixed from start to finish.

Why it got 4 stars:
- The Northman is propulsive, electric storytelling at its best.

Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- This movie has peak dad-movie vibes. I can hear a million dads across the country saying, “Well, that’s just the way it was back then,” to incredulous comments about the brutality of the period that the movie depicts.

Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Rae and I saw this at Alamo Drafthouse - Cedars. It played to a nearly empty theater. I think there might have been 12 of us…maybe.

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