‘The Northman’ review: Robert Eggers’ mighty Viking epic

Not very long into Robert Eggers’ “The Northman,” a mad and mesmerizing music of Iceland and fire, the digicam plunges down into darkness, as if it experienced instantly been swallowed up by the Earth. It is Ad 895, on a frigid North Atlantic island, and we’re adhering to a scrawny younger Viking prince, Amleth (Oscar Novak), and his scraggly bearded father, King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), as they descend into a firelit temple, where the royal stripling is led through a muddy, bloody ceremony of manhood. Amid significantly growling, howling, floating and farting, Aurvandil predicts his personal impending demise and tends to make Amleth vow to avenge him — an oath sealed in blood and destined to be fulfilled with great geysers of gore and lava.

There are lots of these types of grim prophecies and elemental eruptions in “The Northman,” setting up with the movie’s arresting opening shot of a volcano belching smoke, fireplace and voice-more than. (I did not capture every single phrase, but the volcano may as well be declaring, “Behold. Cinema.”) Aurvandil’s fatalistic vision will quickly be proved right: Just after returning dwelling from distant battlefields, the king is brutally slain by his brother, Fjölnir (Claes Bang, “The Square”). Amleth, obtaining witnessed his uncle’s betrayal, scarcely escapes alive but vows to return and avenge his father, as promised, and preserve his mom, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), whom Fjölnir has taken as his spouse. And return he will many years afterwards, now performed by a strapping, towering Alexander Skarsgård in whole-blown Aged Norse berserker method, who tears into this position like a gentleman — and an actor — seizing keep of his future.

If you feeling some mimicry in this insanity, properly spotted: The legend of Prince Amleth was the immediate inspiration for “Hamlet,” however Skarsgård’s mighty warrior also hails from a cinematic pantheon of vengeance seekers broad sufficient to consist of Conan the Barbarian, Maximus and Inigo Montoya. If that can make “The Northman” seem spinoff, it is: a witchy brew of Aged Norse mythology, Hollywood pageantry and proto-Shakespearean revenge epic.

But Skarsgård (also one of the movie’s producers) has observed an best collaborator in Eggers, a director sufficiently steeped in movie heritage to know the variance amongst inspiration and imitation. Like his memorable interval freakouts “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse,” though on a vastly additional bold scale, “The Northman” is equally a dazzling show of movie craft and a sly retooling of genre, a motion picture that delights in satisfying selected conventions although turning others on their artfully severed heads.

And so even though it’s apparent adequate how Amleth’s story will stop, the long arc of his journey requires unpredictable, even unsettling turns. When we initially meet Skarsgård’s absolutely grown Amleth, he’s joined a band of murderous marauders, clad in wolf skins as they convey a Slavic village to its knees. Eggers, taking pictures virtually every single scene in fluid, intricately choreographed extensive will take, provides the action the deliberation and intensity of an historical ritual. (The sweepingly immersive cinematography is by Jarin Blaschke, the spare, purposeful editing by Louise Ford.) This violence is the way of the earth, the movie implies, and the atrocities we’re witnessing — a burning hut evokes the wartime conflagrations of Elem Klimov’s “Come and See” — are as unexceptional as they are unbearable.

Alexander Skarsgård and Anya Taylor-Joy in the motion picture “The Northman.”

(Aidan Monaghan / Concentration Characteristics)

Amleth, courting and thwarting our sympathies at will, is a pretty sturdy website link in an infinite chain of death. (He’s not alone, to decide by an end
-credits crawl loaded with names like “Hrólfur Split-Lip” and “Thórfinnr Tooth-Gnasher.”) As Amleth goes on his most current feral rampage, you simply cannot help but marvel about how numerous young children he’s orphaning and how a lot of spinoff revenge dramas he’s placing in motion.

And Skarsgård, a charmer with an undercurrent of aloofness, is properly cast as a warrior so numb to carnage that it can take a supernatural intervention to remind him of his sworn mission: Fjölnir, Amleth learns, has been dethroned and fled with Gudrún and his sons to Iceland. It’s only fitting that this information is sent by a witchy seeress played by Iceland’s greatest star, Björk, resplendent in oracular blue lighting and a Cher-worthy seashell-ringed headdress.

Björk is one particular of two distinguished Icelandic abilities pressed into assistance in this article. The other is poet and novelist Sjón, who co-wrote the screenplay with Eggers (and who supplied lyrics for Björk’s past major movie, 2000’s “Dancer in the Dark”). Their involvement speaks to Eggers’ characteristic insistence on verisimilitude, born of an obsessive, analysis-pushed tactic to filmmaking that may possibly seem persnickety if it weren’t so passionate.

A production and costume designer before he turned to directing, Eggers has grow to be our fantastic builder of worlds in extremis: Just after the spooky Puritan New England of “The Witch” and the lonely maritime outpost of “The Lighthouse,” he after again conjures a nightmarish vision of humanity on the precipice.

But irrespective of the fastidiousness of “The Northman’s” animal-pelts-and-chain-mail aesthetic, the filmmaking feels freer, looser and nuttier this time around — and not just simply because the spotty visible document of historic Viking culture leaves plenty to an artist’s creativity. (The director’s splendid normal collaborators include generation designer Craig Lathrop and costume designer Linda Muir.)

Happily, Eggers can make motion pictures, not research papers, and his sweet spot is that zone where his art-film idiosyncrasies merge with a genuine aptitude for Hollywood showmanship. Witness the self-consciously florid dialogue, often poetically heightened to the level of torture. Witness as well the motivated landscapes chewing and quasi-Scandinavian accents indulged by Hawke (absent as well soon) and primarily Kidman, whose overall performance as the seemingly demure Gudrún turns out to be a single of the movie’s most deliciously barbed surprises.

Nicole Kidman in the motion picture “The Northman.”

(Aidan Monaghan / Aim Features)

You might recall that Skarsgård and Kidman enjoy a troubled pair in the HBO miniseries “Big Minor Lies,” an affiliation that presents Amleth and Gudrún’s eventual scenes together that a great deal additional of a feverish Oedipal charge. But Eggers is in no temper to hasten the loved ones reunions and revelations, or to blow his protagonist’s go over.

Amleth comes on Fjölnir’s farm a slave, getting stowed away in a boat total of war prisoners, and he’s wily more than enough to go himself off for a whilst as a difficult employee and seemingly faithful spouse and children servant. He and an enslaved ally, Olga (a wonderful Anya Taylor-Joy, reteaming with Eggers just after “The Witch”), bide their time and share their bodies and tricks, laying the groundwork for a marketing campaign of fatal sabotage from Fjölnir’s residence.

People strategies, when they occur to move, are initially attributed to the function of evil spirits. And while Amleth will sooner or later just take his rightful credit as the author of Fjölnir’s ache, the spirit entire world — the raw substance of the Icelandic myths that are this story’s lifeblood — is of supreme importance right here. Eggers, plunging headlong into his product, attracts no difference amongst fantasy and truth, although as a storyteller, he is obviously inclined toward an ardent defense of paganism in all its kinds.

Just as “The Witch” critiqued 17th-century Puritan repression with a gleeful embrace of nude bonfire-dancing devilry, so “The Northman,” with its ominous ravens, bearded he-witches and helmeted Valkyries, treats Viking mythology as its personal dwelling, respiratory, dazzling actuality.

Alexander Skarsgård stars in director Robert Eggers’ Viking epic “The Northman.”

(Aidan Monaghan / Concentration Functions)

You could locate your self longing for more of that fantasy, maybe as a distraction from the inexorable death march that Amleth’s journey is destined to come to be. Eggers, who likes to conjure elaborate visions only to attack their foundations from within, will work difficult to inflect that journey with a self-essential spirit.

There’s a productive rigidity at the heart of “The Northman,” a tug-of-war in between the Hollywood revenge-epic tradition from which it superficially hails and the sharper, more subversive dismantling of simplistic payback fantasies it desires to be.

The final passages are laced with surprises you might or might not see coming, bitter reversals of perspective that complicate — but don’t entirely mitigate — the pleasures of watching a wronged person settle an old score. Bang will make Fjölnir an implacable brute, but not an unsympathetic one particular. The identical is real of Skarsgård, whose vocation-igniting job on “True Blood,” a vampire with Viking roots and the title of Eric Northman, feels like both of those a sequel and a heat-up act to this a person. Amleth could be no unblemished hero, but with a bulging, blood-caked torso and a willingness to storm the gates of hell, he can even now direct you on a trek straight to cinematic Valhalla.