With The Northman, Robert Eggers makes a long-awaited leap in scale, and it results in a sprawling, epic Viking tale worthy of the halls of Valhalla.
Eggers approaches his films like an historian, and not just in the way some filmmakers claim to do through lip service on the press circuit. It’s evident in The Northman’s sheer authenticity, which oozes out of every corner of every frame. One doesn’t need intimate familiarity with the details of Gesta Danorum (the 12th-century Danish historical text from which Eggers and Icelandic poet Sjón adapted the film) to feel it. It’s the same feel that’s present in Eggers’ prior films, The Witch and The Lighthouse, and it grabs its audience by the throat and fully submerges them in tangible worlds.
The authenticity plays out directly through intricate production design, but it’s more deeply shown through Eggers’ storytelling choices. For example, in what has become a staple of his work, there’s a fascinating interplay between straightforward (yet impeccably accurate) period work and the story’s more fantastical elements.
Every time the film starts to lean into pure depictions of fantasy and Viking mythology, it reels backward into grounded reality, which makes the audience question whether what they’re seeing is real, or whether the sequences are brought on through delirious visions or religious fervor. It echoes the way human historical accounts turn fact to legend, and legend to myth, exactly as Danish legend holds up real-life Viking warrior-kings as demigods.
Layering on historical context and paying homage to the source material could have easily derailed the story with density, but the film smartly keeps the plot’s driving force very simple. Viking Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) seeks vengeance for his uncle Fjölnir’s (Claes Bang) traitorous murder of Amleth’s father, King Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke), and seeks to rescue his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), from Fjölnir’s clutches. And that’s pretty much it.
Sure, some of the details may get lost along the way, but extraneous complexities here and there aren’t that important when the characters’ motivations are so sharp and understandable. It helps immensely when all the main characters are introduced basically within the first five minutes, save for Anya Taylor-Joy’s Olga, who’s still introduced in the first act.
It also helps when the cast and director are so clearly on the same page, and Eggers continues to showcase an excellent eye for casting, most notably in Skarsgård’s physicality and reserved determinism and Taylor-Joy’s soft ethereality and cunning demeanor.
But that unabashed slant toward authenticity leads directly to two characteristics that some people just won’t be able to stomach. Most glaringly, this film is extremely violent. It’s not constant, but when it arrives, it does so without shying away from (presumably) historically accurate brutality. This results in thrilling action set pieces worthy of their Viking origins, but it comes with eviscerations, beheadings, and bashings galore.
The film also gets pretty strange, pretty quickly. It’s not quite at the weird level of Willem Dafoe’s wide-eyed, barnacle-laden mermaid in The Lighthouse, but it sure approaches it, most often in wild scenes of animalistic role play from men channeling animal spirits to unleash the signature ferocity of Viking berserkers.
The Northman confirms that nobody executes a vision like Eggers right now, and it’s thrilling to see that execution expanded to such an epic scope. Inevitably, that specific vision will turn a chunk of the audience away, but the technical execution on display is undeniable.
