The Northman
/
Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth in The Northman
Every once in a while I leave the theatre after a movie and, as I cross the parking lot, realize that I’m… not groggy, exactly, but disoriented. A little out of it. Like the real world has become strange to me, like I’ve been gone a long time. The nearest thing I can compare this sensation to is waking up from a deep sleep and a very convincing and involving dream.
The Northman is the first time I’ve had that sensation in many years.
As I’ve written here before, calling a movie “immersive” is a marketing cliché but in this case it’s true, and not far into the story it swallowed me up utterly.
Amleth, Prince of Denmark
The Northman tells the story of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), the only son of the Danish king Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke). At the beginning of the film, Amleth eagerly awaits his father’s return from the raiding season. Aurvandil sails back with a fleet laden with loot and slaves and celebrates uproariously with his son, queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), kinsmen, and hearth-companions, but he broods as well over the need to prepare young Amleth for the responsibilities of manhood—chiefly defending his family and people or, as another character puts it later, “kindness to your kin [and] hatred to your enemies.”
The king takes Amleth through an arcane nightlong rite of passage and rewards him at the end with a neckring and pendant, a sign of his new status. But as they leave the temple where they had passed the night, the king’s bastard half-brother, Fjölnir (Claes Bang) ambushes and kills the king. Amleth, witness to his father’s murder and the depredations of the warriors loyal to Fjölnir, sees his mother being borne off by his uncle before he takes a boat into the open sea, vowing revenge.
“Years later,” as the film tells us, Amleth lives among a band of raiders plundering their way up and down the rivers of the Rus, modern-day western Russia and Ukraine. After a bloody raid on a Slavic village, Amleth overhears a group of slavers divvying up their wares for shipment to distant markets and customers—Uppsala, Kiev, and an exiled king named Fjölnir. Amleth probes for information. Fjölnir was one of several petty kings unseated and driven out by King Harald Fairhair of Norway and lives in Iceland now. “He killed his brother for nothing,” Amleth’s fellow raider tells him. “Now he’s a sheepfarmer.”
Amleth, driven on by the prophecy of a seeress (Björk) he meets in the ruins of the Slavic village he just helped destroy, seizes this opportunity to embrace his fate and seek revenge. He steals Slavic clothing from a corpse, cuts off his hair, and joins the cargo of the slave ship heading for Iceland.
Along the way Amleth meets a prophetess named Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy) who is not fooled by his disguise and, upon arriving in Iceland, he insinuates himself into the slave population of his uncle’s farm. There, he observes his uncle Fjölnir, who is not just any sheepherder but a goði or chieftain and priest of the god Freyr, his mother Gudrún, and her two sons by Fjölnir, and bides his time, working his way up and searching steadfastly for the right moment to avenge his father and rescue his mother. And it soon proves he will need supernatural help.
If any of that sounded familiar, it should. “The Northman is Hamlet,” as James Berardinelli puts it in his review. Both stories originate with the medieval chronicler Saxo Grammaticus, who told the story of Amleth and his quest for revenge in his Gesta Danorum or History of the Danes. Shakespeare did his own thing with the story. What The Northman’s writers and director have done is set it in a hazy part of the Viking Age (the film begins in 895) where a fictional family could fit in and fashion the story into a “lost saga.” And all of the best elements of the Icelandic sagas are here: murder and revenge, seasons of raiding in the Baltic, dueling, outlawry, mountaintop swordfights, violent contact sports, as well as magic, cursed weapons, and ghosts worked without blinking into the workaday life of an Icelandic farm.
Eerie, involving, and exciting, not to mention brilliantly acted and staged with plenty of grim surprises throughout—it’s great.
Kindness to your kin
The Northman is so dramatic and involving and so loaded with nice details that I could easily turn this into a trivia section or bullet list of things I liked or simply noticed. But to keep this review manageable, I’m going to focus on three fairly broad things that I liked about the film.
First, the film is technically excellent. This is no surprise for a film from Robert Eggers, but it bears mentioning. The cinematography, sound, music, and sets are all outstanding, as are most of the costumes (about which more below). It’s also clear that a scrupulous attention to historical detail went into the design and construction of everything shown onscreen, and while it’s not perfect (no historical film will ever be), it’s the best the Viking Age has ever looked in a movie. I especially liked the cinematography, which has a pervasive gothic atmosphere and is dark and moody where appropriate—especially a scene in which Amleth has to visit a, shall we say, hostile location in order to obtain a sword—but also lets some sunshine and green pastures in. The film has a texture that sells everything in it as real, even the most hallucinatory parts.
Second, I appreciated the film’s heavy emphasis on religion. You might get the impression from other modern Viking stories, like Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred novels or that Kirk Douglas movie that I can’t help but enjoy, that the Vikings were essentially boisterous frat boys or laddish soccer hooligans with a tendency to kill people and occasionally mention Oðinn. Not so here. Religion is, realistically, central. The ulfheðnar with whom we first find the adult Amleth raiding in the east stage elaborate rituals ahead of their attacks; Fjölnir becomes, as I mentioned, a priest of the grotesque phallic god Freyr, and we see several rituals underway in the temple that is his responsibility; and we see parts of Norse funerals and other rites.
The Northman also presents us with a religiously diverse Norse world. Slavic slaves engage in hedonistic nature worship and Fjölnir’s farm has a number of Christian slaves—a realistic detail made all the more powerful by its subtlety. And there are both cultural gaps (one Icelander’s attempt to explain the Christian god underscores how little the Norse understand it) and cross-pollination, not to mention rivalry within even Norse heathenism. The chief deity in Aurvandil’s temple is Oðinn, while Fjölnir honors Freyr. This gives us an unusually realistic picture of unsystematic and ritual-oriented worship.
Much of the scenes of Norse religious ritual are, of necessity, speculative reconstructions. As Jackson Crawford has noted, the Christians who eventually wrote many of the stories from the Viking Age down apparently didn’t have much of a problem with mythology but weren’t going to include a how-to on sacrificing slaves to Oðinn. But Eggers and his team’s speculations seem reasonable to me, and unabashedly present the Vikings as weird. To us.
And that’s the third and final aspect of The Northman that I want to praise: Eggers refuses to soft-peddle the Vikings. Right from the beginning we see the key role slave-trading played in the Norse world, the extremes to which raiders would go to bring home a haul of good cargo, and the human cost of this much-romanticized lifestyle. (Watch a Slavic family try to slip their children out the backdoor of their hut when the Vikings arrive and see if your breath doesn’t catch just a little bit.) The film depicts horrific violence bluntly but not gratuitously, with some of the worst violence left to the imagination. This, too, captures the spirit of the sagas, which report shocking murders and mutilations with an almost journalistic blank face. And the principles guiding the characters—kindness to kin, hatred for enemies, honor, and, above all, fate—are their principles, not ours, and are not softened or adjusted for a modern audience.
What The Northman presents is a world in which violence and ruthlessness exist alongside admirable qualities, a juxtaposition anyone who has read any of the sagas will recognize. Even our heroes behave in ways modern people would find off-putting if not deplorable. And that’s a good thing. The Northman takes us entirely outside ourselves, into a world that doesn’t affirm us. In addition to entertaining, thrilling, and chilling us, it should also disturb and challenge us—as any good-faith encounter with the past should.
Hatred for your enemies
As I mentioned, the movie isn’t perfect, but I can dispense with most of my complaints briefly. For one, there’s probably too much yelling. If you watch it you’ll see what I mean. For another, while Eggers wisely dials the perverse ambiguity of The Lighthouse way down, there’s still perhaps a pinch too much of it, but most scenes in which this plays a role work just fine. And there are the inevitable lapses in historical accuracy or intrusions of anachronism. Most of these are minor or easy to miss—such as a shaman wearing the Ægishjálmur, a symbol popular among neopagans but most likely originating hundreds of years after the Viking Age, inscribed on a piece of birchbark on his head—but they’re there.
My biggest complaint was one I anticipated with the release of the first trailer back before Christmas: I’d still like a little less dirt on everybody, a little more hair care, and a little more color in the clothing. The costuming shows us a sharp distinction between different groups—slaves, warriors like the ulfheiðnar in the Kievan Rus, and nobility like Fjölnir—but the contrast may be a little too sharp. The Northman doesn’t reach Monty Python levels of gloom, filth, and matted hair, but it dabbles in all of those things. In a film that otherwise evinces such care in presenting historical people on their own terms, this seemed like too much of a concession to the Game of Thrones aesthetic.
But if that’s my biggest complaint, count me happy.
Conclusion
Throughout this review I’ve been more concerned with how The Northman brings us into its at simultaneously familiar and strange world, and what I appreciated about the filmmakers’ approach. But let me here, at the end, acknowledge again the outstanding performances by the cast and the surehandedness of Eggers as a director. Forceful, moody, well-acted, and completely involving, The Northman is an artistic masterpiece.
