Northman

His thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth (Spoilers)

Amleth (Oscar Novak) is a young Viking prince who’s the son of King Aurvandill War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) and Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman). One day, Aurvandill and Amelth are ambushed by men working for Fjölnir (Claes Bang), Aurvandill’s brother. Amleth manages to escape, but his father is killed, and Gudrún is taken as Fjölnir’s bride. Years later, Amleth becomes Alexander Skarsgård, who sets out to avenge his father. There are no vampires (NSFW) this time around, though.

The trailers had me expecting a movie like Braveheart, where they would be all these epic battle scenes. No, there’s one at the beginning of the film, where Amleth and this band of berserkers attack a settlement, and all the other action set pieces are on a much smaller scale. I was also expecting Amleth to have to retake the kingdom, but no. Fjölnir gets overthrown a few years after killing his brother, so he ends up becoming the chieftain on this island, where there are probably a dozen men and a couple of huts. 

Robert Eggers made this movie, and you can totally tell that. The Northman has all of his trademarks. Beautiful cinematography, meticulous attention to historical accuracy, mystical elements that may have perfectly mundane explanations, and it even shares a couple of the same cast members, notably Anya-Taylor Joy and Willem Dafoe.

Joy plays Olga of the Birch Forest, a white vvitch that lived in the settlement the berserkers raided. She gets sent on this slave ship to Fjölnir’s farm, with Amleth posing as a fellow captive to infiltrate undetected. After he confides in her his true identity and motivations, Olga helps him with her magic, or, at least, her knowledge of herbs. She also has the makings of a great main character in her own right, but alas, this is not her story.

Dafoe plays Heimir, who is not a lighthouse keeper but the king’s court jester. That’s perfect casting right there. Years later, Amleth reunites with Heimir after the latter has become a severed head (“poor Heimir,” he says). Interestingly, Yorick didn’t originate in the legends of Amleth that both The Northman and Hamlet used as inspiration. He was an original creation by Shakespeare.

When Amleth reveals himself to Gudrún, she tells him that she always hated his father. He was a terrible man who enslaved her and only made her queen because she bore him a son. If that wasn’t enough, Gudrún asked Fjölnir to kill Aurvandill. The whole scene reminds me of Marget Atwood’s “Gertrude Talks Back.”

After Gudrún reveals the truth to Amleth, she tells him that if he kills his uncle, she’ll become his queen and start making out with him. Yeah, the nine-year age difference between Kidman and Skarsgård becomes very apparent during that scene. And if that grosses you out, it could have been worse. He could have started dry-humping her like Mel Gibson and Glenn Close. It also seems like she was trying to distract him so she could stab him, but still, incest. You got to love Eggers, who also always has a weird sexual element in his movies.

The weakest element of this movie is the romance that blossoms between Olga and Amleth, which is just, ‘why?’ The romance between Robert Patterson and Dafoe in The Lighthouse made more sense. When they meet on the slave ship, Olga derisively comments on how he’s clearly a Northman in disguise, and the next scene is during a raging storm, where Amleth holds out his hand to Olga, all ‘I’ll save you.’ So, they’re friends now? Did I miss something?

If you’re looking for a middle-of-the-road movie that’s not a remake, reboot, or part of a long-running franchise, The Northman is for you. It’s also my new favorite Robert Eggers movie. It has everything I loved about his previous films, but with more blood and action. That was something I really appreciated because while I can enjoy high-brow films, my usual taste in movies is more shallow. The performances of the cast were good too.