Film Review: The Northman
Images courtesy of Universal Pictures Australia.
Robert Eggers is a director with a distinct approach. The Northman, his third feature film which opens in theatres this Thursday, is immediately recognisable as a film that no other working director would have made. A painstakingly faithful historical epic, the film drops title cards like “NORTH ATLANTIC – 895 AD” and depicts complex rituals and battles with ostensibly museum-level detail. With an existing filmography that unfolds in 1630s Puritan New England (2015’s The Witch) and an island off the coast of the US in the 1890s (The Lighthouse, 2019), Eggers was primed to turn his attention to Viking mythology. The myth in question here appears in Saxo Grammaticus’s 13th-century work Deeds of the Danes and concerns the Viking prince Amleth, and is the foundation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
A young Amleth (Oscar Novak) watches his father the king (Ethan Hawke) die at the hands of his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang) and escapes, swearing bloody revenge. We meet him again, years later, now played as a hulking, animalistic demon by a career-best Alexander Skarsgård. Amleth is a Viking berserker, and one of the most ambitious sequences in a very ambitious film comes when he and his comrades raid a village. In a fascinating New Yorker profile of Eggers, Skarsgård mentions doing 25 takes of a four-minute oner in this scene: they’d get to the end of a shot with action, animals, hundreds of extras, and complex camera moves, and realise that a horse in the background was facing the wrong way. This level of scrupulous detail is felt everywhere as Eggers brings the vast world of Amleth’s story to life.
Eventually though, the movie slows, settles in a single location, and becomes something driven more by intrigue. We get a narrative that evolves, rather than hurtles unwaveringly toward a single act of vengeance. As is his way, Eggers lets his historical detail inform the direction of his storytelling. The Norse of the 9th century are an atavistic people, and Amleth’s motivations are tied up in all kinds of notions about kin, honour, and the afterlife. Likewise, the kind of world that Eggers creates in his films is unashamedly supernatural, quite literally magical-realist: there’s a full-throated embrace (and unwinking depiction) of concepts like Valhalla, and the wonderfully-visualised Tree of Kings.
But at the same time, The Northman is nothing if not grounded. Everything in this world is covered in dirt, and little might lead you to have, say, an optimistic outlook. This is a film that opens on an erupting volcano, contains multiple in-full-view decapitations (both human and equine), and shows its protagonist tearing out a man’s throat with his teeth and howling at the sky. Nothing is held back in the name of Good Taste.
Eggers’ films are quite singular in that they have always seemed to aspire to being simple, folkloric stories, in film form – old-world tales rendered in a modern medium, transporting you entirely to another era. Where The Northman undermines itself, then, is its concessions to the contemporary. Amleth at one point talks to himself aloud to fulfil some exposition. A chain gang in Iceland passes through three of the most photographed, desktop-background landscapes this side of The Isle of Skye. Eggers’ normally-formal camera performs an eye-catching roll to mimic young Amleth being pinned to the ground.
But as the completeness of Eggers’ vision makes itself clear, everything comes to feel cohesive and functional. Skarsgård (whose primal, guttural vocal performance may be his strongest work here) gets his Maximus-in-Gladiator moment: “I am Amleth the Bear-Wolf!”. It might be the most accessible that Eggers will ever get, as the Viking melodrama heightens. What makes it special, though – what makes it great – is that it’s still unlike anything else being made today.
The Northman is screening in cinemas nationwide from tomorrow, Thursday 21st April. For tickets and more info, click here.