- UK release: April 2022
- Director: Robert Eggers · Writers: Sjón; Robert Eggers
- Studio / distributor: New Regency; Focus Features
- Genre: Historical revenge epic / Viking action drama · Runtime: 137 minutes (BBFC 18)
- Main cast: Alexander Skarsgård (The Legend of Tarzan, Big Little Lies) as Amleth; Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge!, The Others) as Queen Gudrún; Claes Bang (The Square) as Fjölnir; Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch, Emma.) as Olga; Ethan Hawke (Training Day) as King Aurvandill
- Rotten Tomatoes: 90% critics / 64% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Robert Eggers has made two films so far, The Witch and The Lighthouse, and both were the kind of tightly controlled, slightly forbidding pieces that win a director a devoted following and a reputation for never compromising. The question hanging over The Northman is what happens when a film-maker like that is handed something close to a blockbuster budget and pointed at a Viking revenge saga. The honest answer is that he does not soften at all. He simply does the same thing on a much larger canvas, and the strangeness survives the scale.
The setup
Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) is a Norse prince who, as a boy, watches his father the king cut down by his own brother, and barely escapes with his life across the sea. Years later he has grown into a raiding berserker, all muscle and rage, when a vision sends him back towards the unfinished business of his childhood: avenge his father, save his mother, kill his uncle. He smuggles himself into his uncle’s farmstead as a slave, biding his time among the people who destroyed his family. If the bones of that sound familiar, they should. This is the legend that gave Shakespeare Hamlet, told back the bloody way round, before anyone thought to make the prince hesitate.
The cast
Skarsgård carries the film physically more than verbally, which suits a character who has burned most of his humanity down to a single purpose. He is genuinely frightening in the raid sequences, and the performance lives in the body rather than the dialogue. Nicole Kidman has the film’s sharpest scene as Queen Gudrún, a mother whose role in the story turns out to be more tangled than the boy’s memory allowed, and she plays the shift with real relish. Claes Bang makes the usurping uncle Fjölnir a smaller, more frightened man than the myth wants him to be, which is the right choice. Anya Taylor-Joy, as the bondswoman Olga, supplies the one thread of warmth and cunning the film has, and her scenes with Skarsgård give the revenge somewhere human to stand. Ethan Hawke is gone early but lands the doomed father with weight.
The craft
This is where the film is at its most impressive. Jarin Blaschke shoots in long, prowling takes and a cold, desaturated palette that makes tenth-century Iceland look like the end of the world. An early raid on a Slavic village plays out in what looks like one continuous shot, the camera gliding through fire and slaughter without flinching or cutting away to spare you. Eggers commits completely to the period: the rituals, the seers, the visions of valkyries and tree-roots of ancestry are presented not as metaphor but as things these people simply believed, and the film never winks at the audience about it. The score by Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough is all drone and drum and throat, and it presses down on every scene. None of this is comfortable, and none of it is meant to be.
How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is Conan the Barbarian, another tale of a boy who watches his family destroyed and spends a lifetime sharpening himself into the instrument of revenge, and The Northman is the same story told with arthouse seriousness instead of pulp swagger. It rhymes with Gladiator in its structure, a wronged man infiltrating the household of the powerful to bring it down, though Eggers has no interest in Ridley Scott’s crowd-pleasing uplift. The closer cousin is Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising, which shares the mud, the dread and the willingness to let a Norse film become a fever dream. Set against the director’s own The Witch and The Lighthouse, this is recognisably the same sensibility scaled up, the folk-horror eye now turned on a battlefield.
Critics versus the rest of us
The split is wide and worth pausing on. Critics are close to unanimous, sitting around 90%, drawn to the craft, the conviction and the refusal to compromise. Audiences are markedly cooler at 64%, and the reason is not hard to find: this is a severe, slow-burning, genuinely brutal film that asks a mainstream crowd expecting a Viking action romp to sit instead through a mythic dirge. Both readings are correct. The film is as good as the critics say and as punishing as the audience warns. Where you land depends entirely on what you wanted from a Friday-night Viking picture, and how much bleakness you can take in one sitting.
Verdict
I admire this enormously and I am in no hurry to watch it again, and those two facts are what fix my score. The craft is close to flawless, the world-building is total, and Eggers has made something with a real point of view in a genre that usually settles for spectacle. What it lacks, for me, is the pull that brings you back: it is so relentless, so committed to its own severity, that it impresses more than it invites. That is a high-quality reservation rather than a real complaint. For atmosphere, conviction and sheer film-making muscle it is one of the best things in cinemas this spring, and it deserves to be seen properly even if you only do it once. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. Best seen on a big screen with the sound turned up, where the raids and the score can do their work.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: The Northman underperformed at the box office on release, the predictable fate of an uncompromising 18-rated epic with a studio budget, but it has settled into a strong reputation as one of the defining serious genre films of its year and a high point for the Viking picture. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on Universal’s platforms depending on region. Eggers followed it with a long-planned remake of Nosferatu, confirming that the budget on The Northman did nothing to dilute his sensibility.
BBFC content advice
Rated 18 by the BBFC for strong bloody violence, gore, sexual violence, sex, nudity. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are frequent scenes of strong bloody violence, including stabbings and decapitations. A man is repeatedly head-butted. In another scene, a man is stabbed through the nose in profile. Gore includes sight of a man falling to the ground with organs spilling from an open wound, and the brief image of the mutilated bodies of two men pinned to a hut. There are scenes in which children are killed, the implied killing of a dog, and the decapitation of a horse.
Threat and horror: There are scenes of threat.
Sex: There are scenes of sex that feature buttock nudity and thrusting detail, and occasional sex references.
Drugs: People take psychotropic drugs as part of rituals.
Sexual violence and sexual threat: There are brief moments of sexual violence including sight of women being pinned to the ground and women being chased and grabbed by men. There are also verbal references to rape. In one scene, a woman reveals her vulva - which is stained with menstrual blood - in order to deter a man from raping her. There is also a brief scene in which a woman makes unwanted sexual advances towards her adult son who quickly condemns her behaviour.
Nudity: There is breast, buttock and genital nudity.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
