The Northman heaves with furious medieval energy. Too bad Ethan Hawke and Nicole Kidman are in it.
The Northman heaves with furious medieval energy. Too bad Ethan Hawke and Nicole Kidman are in it.
I ’ve never seen a great Viking movie. Have you? Robert Zemeckis’s 2007 Beowulf certainly wasn’t my cup of mead. Thor: Ragnarok was funny, but I crave a dead-serious, blood-and-iron, screaming-Valkyrie, cinematic knockout. The Northman is . . . almost it.
The problem with Viking films is that Vikings can come off a bit silly if you’re not careful, and anything that makes viewers snort in derision destroys the mood. If the director doesn’t maintain a feel of roaring pagan intensity throughout, you become aware that these are really just 21st-century pretty boys playing dress-up in fake bearskins. What I’m trying to say is: Sorry, I don’t buy Ethan Hawke as a medieval Icelandic warlord. Hawke has a slacker vibe that disqualifies him for any historical epoch before the 1950s, and the more he grunts and yowls and cries that he demands to die in battle, the more you want his wish to be granted just to get him off the screen. Also, he seems a bit pudgy for a guy living through a notably lean period of human history.
Alexander Skarsgård, though: Now he’s a Viking. Skarsgård plays a warlord’s vengeful son, Amleth, who as a boy flees from an attack on his village, is sold into slavery, and returns as an adult vowing to liberate his mother (Nicole Kidman) and slay his treacherous uncle (Claes Bang). Yes, this is the Hamlet story, crossed with elements of Ben-Hur, and realized with loads of filthy, disgusting, excessive, and (hence) glorious violence. If gore disturbs you, stay clear of this movie. These are not merciful people. That’s why they’re called Vikings. I particularly enjoyed the way a kid slices off a guy’s nose with a whisk of his dagger, and how a guy on a hillside trolls his archrival by holding up the heart he has just carved out of his enemy’s son’s chest. The big showdown is, like every other event in the movie, announced with a grave and lapidary menace:
“I will meet you at the gates of Hel.”
“By the gates of Hel you will find me.”
Excellent. There’s also a breathtaking recurring image of a “Tree of Kings” in which corpses are strung up like grotesque ornaments, a juicy torture sequence, a freaky interlude featuring a terrifying soothsayer played by Bjork, a field-hockey game in which bashing skulls is as central to the sport as hitting the ball, and a scene in which villagers fret that “Christian monsters” are responsible for an attack that concluded with body parts affixed to a wall because, after all, “their god is a corpse nailed to a tree.” Most of this material has exactly the intended effect, to root us in a savage world of pagan ritual and gasp-inducing violence in which every sentient being is as volcanic as the scenery. The movie is almost as brutal as our Monday morning editorial meetings (presided over by Lowry on his throne of skulls and Ponnuru wearing the blood of his enemies as body paint).
The Northman isn’t exactly a triumph, but with its many knockout moments, it represents a big step forward for the youngish director Robert Eggers, who for the first time has a big budget ($90 million) to work with. Eggers’s last film was the brilliant-looking if pretentious Bergmanesque psychological drama The Lighthouse (2019), and before that, in his debut, he put on a master class in how to create overwhelming atmospheric dread with no budget whatsoever in his much-admired 2016 film of early New England The Witch, which was also the feature debut of Anya Taylor-Joy. Now that she’s a big star thanks to her spellbinding performance in Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, it’s sporting of her to return to work for Eggers, this time as Amleth’s fellow slave, love interest, and possible matriarch of his dynasty. She doesn’t get enough to do, but she makes an impact in a small role.
PHOTOS: The Northman
Less successful is Kidman, lately seen as Aquaman’s mother and perhaps confusing the imperatives of a comic-book movie with the more tragic feel of an art-house epic. “Your sword is long,” she tells one man suggestively. Like Hawke, she interferes with the direction of the movie and nudges it back toward overprocessed Hollywood cheese product whenever she’s on-screen. She and Hawke and some of the others who try for an Icelandic accent wind up sounding closer to Count Dracula. She’s not exactly campy, but too close for my taste.
Which is the main drawback: Whenever I got temporarily swept away on the tides of myth, a bit of silliness in the next scene would wash me back to shore and remind me that The Northman is only a movie. This never happened in The Witch and, flawed though it was, The Lighthouse was at least demonically true to its vision. When you finally get a big budget to play with, it invariably comes with strings attached, and the suits may have pushed Eggers in the direction of hokum. “I will cut the thread of fate!” is the kind of thing heroes shout in this movie. But chains of gold can be hard to snip.
