The Northman

 Robert Eggers' The Northman (2022) is a morose, doom-laden revenge drama capitalizing on recent enthusiasm for Vikings.  As with the ancient Egyptians, fascination with the Vikings waxes and wanes.  At this moment, we are experiencing a Viking revival:  several important studies have traced the history and archaeology of the Norsemen (Laughing Shall I Die:  the Lives and Deaths of Great Vikings by Tom Shippey and Children of Ash and Elm by Neil Price) and there have been popular TV shows about the Vikings, including a historically exact comedy series from Norway, Norsemen; of course, Game of Thrones and its offshoots were filmed in Iceland and has a vaguely Viking esthetic. Eggers' The Northman has been researched to within an inch of its life and I have no doubt that the movie is true to many details of Scandinavian life around the year 895 (a title identifies the period):  it all looks painfully authentic and the characters speak in a sort of menacing gibberish and there are many scenes featuring shamanic and religious rituals, but the movie is inert, sluggish, and completely unconvincing notwithstanding some impressive actors-- Willem Dafoe gets a cameo and the hero is played by Alexander Skarsgaard.  As both Shippey and Price point out, the Vikings murdered and mutilated and enslaved lots of folks and were inscrutable bad-asses when they embarked on raids, but, by and large, the Norsemen, at least in the off-season, were peasant farmers and spent most of their lives raising sheep and oats and a lot of their culture involved agriculture, harvest feasts, weaving and activities of that sort.  Eggers' Vikings are single-minded killing machines and they are utterly and completely humorless, a serious defect in the film particularly for viewers who know the sagas and appreciate the sardonic, understated comedy in those epics.  The Northman features lots of burly men with tangled hair and beards glowering implacably at one another -- everyone, even the women, display war faces and they scowl and glare to beat the band.  

The story is a crayola-crayon version of Hamlet.  A well-born youth observes his uncle ambush his father so as to murder him and seize the crown -- an honor that seems to be rulership over some wretched villages and few subterranean chambers full of fires tended by sullen norns and sorcerers, but with Nicole Kidman as the Queen of the realm.  After biting off the nose of one of the murderers, the dead man's son escapes.  A few years later, we see him practicing ferocity with a bunch of berserkers -- more burly men prancing around next to big bonfires.  In the land of Rus, the Viking longboats raid a village, kill a lot of people, and take slaves.  In an elaborate and pointless scheme to book passage to Iceland, where the murderer of his father is now farming, the hero brands himself with a red-hot iron as a slave (a thrall) and survives a tempestuous passage to Rekyavik where he gets purchased by (you guessed it) his uncle the murderer.  (There would have been a lot easier way to accomplish the various killings that the film features but, as in the Shakespeare version, the narrative requires intricacies and delays before the revenge plot can get properly underway.)  With the assistance of a Slavic prophetess, one of the breed of very pale skinned and blonde women who populate HBO's Game of Thrones et. al., the hero starts slaughtering people on his uncle's remote farmstead.  For a while, the movie plays out like a version of Beowulf with a night-stalker dragging men out of the mead-hall and positioning them picturesquely on the thatched roof of the building.  The hero exposes his plot to his mother (Nicole Kidman) but, guess what? -- she doesn't want to be rescued by her murderous son and, in fact, was complicit in the butchery of her husband, our protagonist's father.  So the hero kills everyone but his uncle, saving him for the climactic face-off. Then, there's a big volcanic eruption and the two hefty swordsmen meet for a climactic duel staged, implausibly, in the middle of trickling red creeks of magma.  Most of the movie is shot at night.  There are lots of ravens and, in one scene, the animal helpers peck away the hero's rope fetters so that he can escape and continue to prosecute his revenge.  We get a Viking funeral, complete with a ship and horse sacrifices.  A human sacrifice is planned but thwarted -- everyone speaks in ornate nonsense that is completely remote from any form of human diction.  Bjork appears as some of kind of norn or weird woman.  Nicole Kidman gets a long speech in which she admits to her criminality and taunts her son -- it's impressive in a dreary sort of way.  A raid on a village is staged in one or two very long takes that are quite well choreographed but strangely ineffective -- you can admire the long tracking shot without finding it particularly interesting.  The movie is very long and dull.

Robert Eggers is a film-maker of promise although his best movie was his first and cheapest, The Witch.  Obviously, he is an assiduous researcher and The Witch was an effective tour of English peasant folkways and superstitions and, in fact, quite frightening -- it involved an isolated farmstead (as in The Norseman) and a talking goat.  The Lighthouse, shot in morbid black and white, was an elaborate two-handed study in cabin fever; two lighthouse-keepers boozing it up with some horrible decoction (rum mixed with tar?) while going violently mad on a small rock island surrounded by turbulent sea.  Eggers is insistent upon people speaking his own particular dialect in his films and, in The Lighthouse, the accents are so heavy that I couldn't understand any of the long and, apparently, impressive speeches.  The movie was much ado about nothing:  a cabin fever epic way too long for its subject matter.  The Norseman is similarly obtuse -- the story is uninteresting and it's hard to understand the guttural and oracular declarations of the characters.  There is some throat-singing on the soundtrack.  We see a Valkyrie who inexplicably is wearing orthodontic braces on her teeth and there are repeated shots of Yggdrisal, the World Tree, with corpses dangling from its branches.  Sjon, the Icelandic magic realist novelist, wrote the screenplay with Eggers.