Revenge stories are as old as fiction itself. Protagonist-seeks-vengeance is a sturdy, reliable narrative arc that, when done well cinematically (Carrie, Kill Bill, John Wick, Oldboy), still delivers. When done poorly, revenge tales are belabored. Derivative. Predictable. Drab. I am delighted to report that The Northman does vengeance as well as any film in recent memory.
The third feature from writer-director Robert Eggers, The Northman benefits from a budget significantly larger than those of his absolutely killer 2015 debut The Witch and 2019’s divisive but singular The Lighthouse. Yet another period piece, this one follows Viking prince and warrior Amleth, played in childhood by Oscar Novak and in adulthood by a hulking, primal Alexander Skarsgård. (Amleth, for what it’s worth, is the name of a Scandinavian legendary character who was the direct inspiration for Shakespeare’s Hamlet — and the parallels between The Northman and the melancholy Dane do not end there.)
Amleth is the son of Ethan Hawke’s King Aurvandill War-Raven and Nicole Kidman’s Queen Gundrùn. He’s also the heir to his father’s kingdom before it’s seized by his villainous uncle, Aurvandill’s brother Fjölnir, who kills the king in cold blood. Thought dead, young Amleth sails off to distant lands, vowing to return and seek vengeance.
Many years later, Amleth has joined up with a crew of bloodthirsty marauders, having all but abandoned his quest for revenge. That is, until one of his Viking clan’s pillaging conquests brings him in contact with a blind clairvoyant mystic played by Björk — a frequent collaborator of The Northman co-writer Sjón — who tells Amleth that his opportunity for vengeance has come. Flirtation with magical realism is a familiar theme for Eggers, who punctuates his films with hallucinatory visions and supernatural beings, some of whom may be figments of his characters’ imaginations.
Posing as a slave, Amleth heads to Iceland, where his uncle — now a chieftain — has taken Gundrùn as his wife and rules over a small farming village. Amleth spends the remainder of the film plotting his uncle’s downfall alongside Anya Taylor-Joy’s Olga, a sorceress and fellow slave. The Northman is full of gorgeous fire- and moonlit shots, not to mention a game of proto-lacrosse and a volcano that works a bit like Chekhov’s gun — if you show us an imposing, steaming mountain in the first act … well, we’d better see it again by the finale.
There’s a murderers’ row of world-class performers here. Skarsgård — perpetually either glistening, howling or brooding — moves the plot along capably, while Taylor-Joy is enchanting as ever. Claes Bang’s Fjölnir is a compelling baddie, and Willem Dafoe is a delight in his limited time on screen as Heimir the Fool. But it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Kidman brings the house down as Queen Gundrùn, playing the character with shades of both Oedipus’ Jocasta and Hamlet’s Gertrude, and turning in the film’s best moment as The Northman approaches its climax.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper Viking-era revenge saga were there no gore — and brother, there’s gore by the bucketful. Red-black blood spills, severed appendages abound, and eviscerated entrails cascade like so many sausage links. As a close friend of mine likes to say, Eggers delights in putting the most beautiful movie stars on the planet in remote locales and smearing their faces with muck.
But amid all his mucked-up beauties, bizarre period-correct customs and glistening viscera, Eggers also knows how to build a straightforward, stakes-driven plot, marrying historical accuracy with the apocryphal lore of the given era. Thanks to intensely committed performances, the keen lensing of cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and clear motivations that drive the plot along like a humming V8 engine, The Northman does revenge as well as anyone could.
