Review: The Northman (2022)

 The Northman (2022)

Rated R for strong bloody violence, some sexual content and nudity

Score: 4 out of 5

The Northman is a movie that will either make you a man, or make you feel extremely inadequate. Even if you’re a Barbie girl living in a Barbie world, you will step out of that theater a shieldmaiden screaming like Xena, and if you already consider yourself kinda manly, you will step out looking up what gym Alexander Skarsgård went to in order to get that ridiculously jacked. It doesn’t matter that, beneath its axe-swinging, Viking-pillaging, mead-swilling bloody mayhem in service of a Norse retelling of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (or rather, an adaptation of the original myth that the Bard Anglicized), it’s kind of a grim satire and deconstruction of that fixation on honor and righteous vengeance as cornerstones of masculinity, portraying them as leading the protagonist Amleth down a self-destructive path that ends in misery for him. No, this is Robert Eggers, always a stickler for period detail and accuracy in his movies, switching from horror to sword-and-sorcery action and combining a gritty “dung ages” portrayal of pre-Christian Northern Europe with just enough prophecy and magic realism that you’re not quite sure if Amleth is being guided by the gods to avenge his parents or simply going mad with berserker rage. This is 300 for the arthouse set with more self-awareness about the kind of people we’re supposed to be rooting for, the kind of movie that Eggers had to have known he’d never get another chance to make (certainly not after his reported $90 million budget unfortunately brought in less than $15 million on opening weekend) but which I’m glad he did.

The film starts with an adolescent Amleth, son of a petty king in Norway, undergoing a trippy-as-balls coming-of-age ritual that marks him as a man – just in time to watch his uncle Fjolnir seize the throne, kill his father, take his mother as his new bride, and burn the village, forcing Amleth to flee by land and sea. We meet him again as a grown man taking part in a Viking raid in the land of the ancient Rus, where, right away, we see that Eggers is not interested in whitewashing just what kind of people the Norse really were when they went a-Viking. This is a tale of brutal violence, peasants kidnapped and sold into slavery, the people the raiders couldn’t fit on their boats locked in a building that’s then set on fire to dispose of them, and sundry other medieval atrocities committed by both the heroes and the villains, with zero expectation that they do anything else. The Norse were barbarians in the classic sense of the term, and they are only romanticized here in the sense that they’re terrifying warriors who take what they want by force, the same way in which we romanticize gangsters. These are not the cuddly Vikings of countless media that tries to portray them as straightforwardly heroic, at least not unless you’re the kind of dingus who seems to have unfortunately latched onto this movie as showing off an ideal of what “real Aryan men” used to be like.

And Amleth is no different. Yes, he’s badass, but it all comes with a queasy aftertaste as you realize that he’s not just destroying the lives of countless innocents who stand between him and his vengeance, he’s also ruining his own life by taking his journey to Iceland that a mystical maiden warned him would end on the slopes of a fiery volcano. For starters, the reason he’s heading to Iceland in the first place is because Fjolnir subsequently lost his throne when his kingdom was conquered (a likely allusion to Harald Bluetooth’s wars that united Norway), forcing him into exile as a humble sheep herder on a desolate rock, already a rather appropriate and poetic end for a scumbag like him. This movie wears its inspiration from Hamlet on its sleeve not just in its specific story beats, but in how it questions the very goal of its protagonist as being more trouble than it’s worth, particularly after a late-in-the-game reveal that calls into question everything we thought we knew about Amleth’s parents and whether their honor and legacy are worth fighting for. It’s a film where the badassery feels hollow by design, one that I’m sure was influenced in no small part by the God of War games (and not just the newest one that had Kratos battle the Norse gods and legends) in how it presents a vision of hyper-masculinity so cartoonishly over-the-top that it loops back around and turns into a meditation on what such a life can do to a man. By the time Amleth and Fjolnir, both of them buck naked, are having their climatic confrontation, you can’t help but wonder if any of this was worth it for either of them.

The trippy atmosphere, a specialty of Eggers’ that gets blown up on a minor blockbuster budget here, does a lot to lend the film a feeling of inevitable doom. The supernatural elements here are undeniable, especially how everything happens exactly as the oracle predicted it would, but they are presented in such a way that it’s never easy to tell if what you’re seeing is real or Amleth losing his mind. It reads and plays like a more explicitly artsy version of the ‘80s Conan the Barbarian movie, another film that combines muscular savage men doing savagery to other men with philosophical meditations on human nature, though Eggers’ perspective is a bit different from John Milius’. It’s a movie where you can easily turn off your brain for two-and-a-half hours and then walk out of the theater thinking that what you just witnessed was awesome, but even visually, there are countless layers to unpack. I fully expect history nerds in particular to pore over the film, what with Eggers’ pursuit of realism encompassing everywhere from the role of women in Norse society (love the depiction of the one Viking lady hollering on horseback) to the villages of the pre-Christian Norse and Rus to the implication that Olga, the fair Rus maiden who accompanies Amleth on his journey, is in fact the future Saint Olga of Kyiv, a real-life historical figure of great importance in both Russian and Ukrainian national mythology. Eggers is as committed to immersing you, the viewer, in an ancient, savage world where people truly, genuinely believed in supernatural forces existing alongside them as he was when he made The Witch and The Lighthouse, moving the setting across the Atlantic from New England (or Vinland, if you prefer) to Scandinavia and getting a lot more money with which to do it but sacrificing none of his commitment, and it pays off on the screen.

It's not a breezy film. It wears its runtime on its sleeve, and there are points, especially in the middle of the film where Amleth has just arrived in Iceland, where I think it could've benefited from a runtime at least ten to fifteen minutes shorter. There's a lot of movie packed in here, and the seams definitely start to stretch and wear at points, with many moments in the second act that feel like Eggers trying to get as much out of his medieval farm set as he could. After a certain point, it starts to feel less immersive and more like the film is stalling for time as opposed to showing Amleth planning his revenge. These scenes did help build mood, but it was a mood that the film had already pretty well established, and I was grateful when Nicole Kidman showed up to really get the ball moving in the third act.

The Bottom Line

The Northman isn't quite the bloody Viking action flick it's been sold as, taking a far more cynical and deconstructive view on its subject than one might expect... but I'll be damned if it doesn't have a whole lot of gnarly shit in there too. I expect it to live a long life as both an all-time great "man movie" and one of the definitive Viking flicks.