Robert Eggers’ Weakest Film Still Rules Hard
Hamlet really needed a few dozen more axe murders.
There’s a lot to be said for the quality of a filmmaker’s oeuvre when even his weakest movie is one of the most striking action epics to be released this decade. But after the one-two punch of his eerie horror debut, The Witch, and his unhinged psychological thriller, The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers’ third film, The Northman, fell a little short of expectations.
It’s certainly his most straightforward film: a revenge epic inspired by Norse mythology, The Northman is basically Shakespeare’s Hamlet in everything but name. That’s not an accident, as the story of Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), who vows vengeance on his power-hungry uncle (Claes Bang) for murdering his father (Ethan Hawke) and stealing his rightful place on the throne, is the basis for the Shakespeare classic.
Eggers’ film is a little too slavishly devoted to adapting the original tale, but his bold injection of surreal, brutish artistry into the action epic is still miles more exciting and daring than most other modern tentpoles. And while Eggers may mostly credit The Northman as being a blockbuster-sized training ground for him to hone the skills he needed for his longtime passion project, Nosferatu, it should be considered more than a stepping stone in the director’s filmography.
The Northman follows Amleth (Skarsgård), an exiled prince of a Viking kingdom in the North Atlantic driven from his home after his uncle Fjölnir (Bang) murdered his father (Hawke), kidnapped his mother (Nicole Kidman), and stole his throne. But Amleth escaped his fate by biting off the nose of the soldier that Fjölnir sent to slay him.
Twenty years later, Amleth has become a hardened Viking berserker who captures slaves for various Nordic kings. But after one particularly bloody raid, Amleth receives a vision of an eyeless seer (Bjork), who reminds him of his vow for vengeance. When he hears that one group of slaves will be sent to King Fjölnir, whose once-great kingdom has diminished to a small farmstead in Iceland, he stows away as a slave. On the boat to Iceland, he strikes up an unexpected connection with fellow slave Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), who offers him her witch-like powers to aid his quest. But when he arrives in the barren land where the remains of his former kingdom now live, Amleth's quest takes a turn for the strange.
Skarsgård and Taylor-Joy in one of The Northman’s less wild moments.
Eggers’ singular talent for making his period pieces feel distinctly of the time kind of bites him in the butt with The Northman. Blame Shakespeare for being the cornerstone of Western storytelling and establishing the very familiar and classic narrative structure that The Northman follows to a tee. As a result, the film’s structure and tone can feel a little too airless and archaic for modern audiences.
But The Northman is far from boring. Eggers employs surreal cosmic imagery and several phantasmagoric sequences that elevate the film beyond other action epics. While its revenge tale is familiar and its endless onslaught of bone-crunching gore slightly tedious, each fantastical vision — whether it be a cackling, eye-less Bjork, skeletal warriors that spring to life, or blue-eyed gods screaming in triumph — feels like something we’ve never seen before. Ditto the film’s more primal touches, like the pagan ritual in which Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe howl at each other like wolves in a cave, or the climactic battle in which Amleth and his uncle battle each other inside a volcano while stark naked.
The Northman might be Eggers’ least interesting movie, but that doesn’t make it any less awesome. It may not be rewriting the cinematic language of revenge movies, but its brutal action and brief brushes with the fantastical show that there’s plenty of new ground to tread in the age-old narrative.
