Film production company Focus Features released “The Northman” on April 22 with a star-studded cast that, to my surprise, was not a huge snore fest but an inhalation of fierce brawls and dramatic love.
All audiences really need to know about “The Northman,” a $90 million Viking revenge film directed by Robert Eggers, is that every single minute of it feels like a $90 million Viking revenge saga directed by Robert Eggers.
Eggers is an American director and screenwriter known for eerie historical horror films including 2015’s “The Witch” and 2019’s “The Lighthouse.” When asked by Gabriella Paiella, a reporter for GQ magazine, if Eggers would make a movie set in modern times, he responded with “No thank you.”
“The Northman” was a huge movie and despite not all of it being good, the story was drawn out with the best visuals that mixed Viking age history with mythology.
The film stars Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy, Claes Bang and many other familiar faces.
This is my favorite Eggers film by far. “The Witch” was boring until the last twenty minutes and “The Lighthouse” left me speechless in a not-so-great way. “The Northman” had a narrative and a style that matched along with the story.
Prince Amleth, played by Skarsgård, embarks on a harrowing mission to avenge his father’s death and save his captured mother.
The story is based on the early 13-century tale written by Danish historian, Saxo Grammaticus, which inspired William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, according to a Friday Time Magazine article.
I thought that this movie would have dark lighting the whole time and be hard to understand but I was surprised at the amount of light that was in a Viking movie and I was not disappointed.
I like to see what I’m watching in a film and when it’s dark 90% of the time I can’t do that. “The Northman” at times was dim but I loved seeing the 930 A.D. timeline in sunrise and daylight.
The film felt more like an ancient poem about brutality written in blood than just a spectacle.
When the characters aren’t speaking English, they speak Old Norse, a language that was common during the ninth and 13 century but is still spoken today by Icelanders in a modern style according to a July 11, 2019 Babbel Magazine article.
Babbel is a German-based language learning app that centers on learning a language through real-life conversations, according to its website.
On top of that, the characters had accents that stilted their diction and at times was very hard to comprehend. This didn’t take away from the story and if anything made me feel more engrossed in their world to the point that I believed I wouldn’t have survived in those times.
I was clinging to the edge of my seat as the movie progressed but I was almost nose to the screen when Kidman stole the show as her character, Queen Gudrùn, delivered a frighteningly intimate plot twist in a monologue to her son, Amleth.
The acting in this movie was beyond phenomenal. Kidman plays an innocent queen at first but then the character shifts completely in the second act.
Taylor-Joy plays Olga, a character with a deep connection to the spiritual world and nature, who is sneaky and feisty when she meets Amleth. Towards the end of act three she delivers a chilling monologue calling to the gods in the Old Norse language.
There’s a scene when she’s vilely looking at her own hands, bringing them to her heart and then madly acting like she ripped her own chest open throwing her hands in the air. Then, the scene abruptly cuts to a shot of a volcano exploding. Taylor-Joy’s body language is so enchanting that at that moment, I wasn’t thinking about anything else.
I was so glad that there was more of Taylor-Joy in this movie than I expected. She gave the tale a much-needed romantic spin amidst the fighting.
Skarsgård yells, howls, and fights in mud, blood, and guts nearly shirtless the whole beginning of the movie just to be naked at the end of it.
Skarsgård said in an IMDb fan Q&A that he barely remembers shooting the movie and that “it was just like a muddy, bloody, haze.”
By the end of the film I was trying to process what I’d just seen and instead of being overwhelmed, I was satisfied.
“The Northman” has a 1:19:1 aspect ratio instead of the normal 1.85:1 widescreen format making it not fill the entire screen. It was distracting at first but later I found Eggers told NBC News that it “inspires an uncanny feeling of claustrophobia,” and I was sold.
I couldn’t imagine seeing it on my little computer because I needed to be engulfed in Egger’s world. If there’s a “needs to be watched in a theater” category for movies, this one is in it.
I’d give the film 4 and a half stars because there were moments of laughs, gasps and complete silence.
“The Northman” is now playing only in theaters.
