There are a lot of Egg heads out there. Robert Eggers has always been a filmmaker I admired, but I found watching his movies to be a giant drag, completely built on brilliant atmosphere and incredible set design alone. I held out hope that once he left the horror genre and built his movie a bit more around a narrative plot, I could be in for something special. Eggers then up and makes The Northman, a resounding “Hell Yeah” of a movie that reminds me hope floats, sometimes to Valhalla.
I will avenge you father. I will save you mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir. Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard) mutters these words to himself over and over again. In his youth Amleth witnessed Fjölnir (Claes Bang) murder his brother/Amleth’s father, the king, Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke) and take Amleth’s mother Gudrún (Nicole Kidman) as his wife. In 895 AD, this single mindedness gives Amleth purpose, and, with the help of Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), a fellow “slave,” Amleth devises a path back to Fjölnir, to fulfill his 3 promises and earn back his father’s kingdom and respect.
Yes, The Northman’s story is simple. But simple stories can be the most powerful, which Eggers definitely accomplishes here. The simplicity befits the time period, 895 AD, where there weren’t exactly streaming services or even book deliveries educating the masses. If you were royalty? In Norse mythology, seers would grant you some sort of prophecy which bound you to your fate. That is Amleth’s religion, which at the time would define his personality. Temptations come for Amleth in the form of diverting from his life’s purpose: living a happy life with a lovely wife and kids, becoming an unknown warrior, questioning that purpose from new information. Eggers makes it clear that at that time, to question one’s faith/purpose is to basically sacrifice a person’s soul to hell, so choices that seem obvious today are much more clouded in Eggers’s Norse tale.
The Northman’s simple tale is surrounded by what can only be described as a Robert Eggers’s masterpiece. Enlisting several historians and a student of Norse mythology himself, Eggers takes all his amazing production capacity and directing capability to drench The Northman in his resplendent visual style and historical accuracy. His understanding of life in Scandanavia lets Eggers make incredible daring sequences of drug tripping, marriage courting, and plundering that the director made sure were period correct but also fit seamlessly into Amleth’s quest. Eggers’s penchant for visual mythological storytelling works perfectly here, as we see all these old Norse seers and prophets give Amleth drugs to open his mind and give the audience powerful, visual understanding of what he is feeling/seeing that gives him that single minded life’s purpose toward his fate. Eggers adds to his directing prowess too, crafting some incredible action sequences. One in particular follows Alexander Skarsgard as he and his soldiers lay siege on a town. It is jaw dropping to watch, and frightening too, as Eggers’s visual motif makes you realize that Amleth isn’t a superhero, he’s just a man, and men can die. All these cultural, story, cinematography, and design choices come from Robert Eggers’s brilliant singular vision of The Northman, and elevate everything about this movie into the upper echelon of great revenge tales.
The last piece of the puzzle was the acting. Alexander Skarsgard’s acting resume is all over the place. He’s been great on TV, but never quite found the right movie vehicle. The Northman was what we were waiting for. Skarsgard is awesome here, a chiseled badass of a viking that always lets you know subtly what he’s feeling/going through. It’s a great, complex action hero performance. Claes Bang is also quite good as Fjölnir, a more world weary, wiser man than Skarsgard’s simple-minded Amleth, and also more well written than most revenge movie bad guys. Surrounding them is an incredible group of character actors and Oscar nominees (Taylor-Joy, Kidman, Willem Dafoe, Hawke, Bjork, among others), who each get at least one scene to bring the story to new heights.
It’s not super great when you look for the best Viking movie, and a Marvel movie and an animated Dragon adventure are in the top 5 (sorry Toothless, you know I love you). Well, The Northman should settle that argument for a long, long time. Robert Eggers finally found a story to perfectly fit his ability to craft a visual feast around it to make the movie incredible. I hope Eggers continues to take his prodigious talents and continue to genre hop. Oh man, a Robert Eggers romcom? That movie’s gonna be terrifying!