movie reviews the northman

The Northman

Describing “The Northman” as director Robert Eggers’ most accessible film verges on misleading. The filmmaker’s prior works—the puritanical hallucinations of “ The Witch ” and the desolate, mermaid fetishization of “ The Lighthouse ”—traded in traditional macabre American folklore for unconventional, ambient freak-outs. “The Northman” repeats the best instincts of those films, though to lesser effect. It demands audiences deconstruct overbearing patriarchal values, toxic masculine heroism, and the folly of revenge by pulling viewers through extreme devotion to familial honor. Eggers’ brand of psychological shock is bolder here than his prior works and potent in bursts, but barely works on boldness alone.

When Eggers first released “The Witch” his brand of horror was deemed, backhandedly, as “elevated.” The New England filmmaker delivered genre-breaking frights with a fresh devil-may-care glee for the sinister that pushed the sonic and visual possibilities of supernatural angst. With “The Northman,” Eggers uses slicker aesthetics and broader emotions, played out over a grander scale, with his familiar interests in the inherent weirdness that courses through ancient mythology. It’s the tale of Amleth ( Alexander Skarsgård ), a hulking, enraged Viking warrior prince who’s seeking retribution for a lost kingdom in Scandinavia. Modern audiences will know this legend by its well-known English adaptation, Hamlet , recalling unbreakable Amleth’s resolve, as unforgiving as the punishing landscape, to earn back his usurped crown. 

This isn’t a prototypical hero’s journey replete with a dashing royal, however. Amleth occupies a different, harsher kill-or-be-killed era where no higher honor can befall a king than to die by the blade. His father King Aurvandill ( Ethan Hawke ), recently returned from war, damaged and wounded, worships this reality by preparing his young son for the eventuality of bloodshed: a carnal ritual taking place in a smoky, otherworldly cavern that involves a mystical invocation to the ancestors led by Heimir the Fool (an unhinged Willem Dafoe ), whereby Amleth and Aurvandill whoop and holler on all fours like wolves. In the world of “The Northman” we’re all just rabid animals occupying flabby sacks of human skin. The only obligations we have are primal: to avenge one’s father, and to defend one’s mother and kingdom. It’s an oath similarly taken by his mother Queen Gudrún ( Nicole Kidman ) and ignored by his uncle, the imposing black-bearded Fjölnir ( Claes Bang ), who, of course, brings tragedy to young Amleth’s life by killing his father—forcing him to far-flung shores where he becomes a bitter, musclebound warrior.  

Much of the film, lensed by Jarin Blaschke and edited by Louise Ford (Eggers’ collaborators on “The Lighthouse” and “The Witch”), rests on a polished visual flair, exercising more camera movement than usual for the director. A vicious sequence involving Amleth and a band of skin-clad Vikings, covered in bear-pelt headdresses, edited with razor-sharp clarity by Ford, sees the pack methodically rampaging a village for kills. The elaborate tracking shot accompanying the scene feeds the camera’s delirious appetite for flesh with bodies bathed in blood, and the bone-chilling macho screams emanating from insatiable men. One shot, recalling Elem Klimov’s antiwar flick “ Come and See ,” finds a burning house filled with wailing villagers as a backdrop to Amleth’s unflinching gaze into the camera. Unlike Klimov’s film, this isn’t the image of a boy horrifically marked by war. This is a savage and defiant man fueled by conflict and gore.  

“The Northman” is the kind of movie where even the mud has rage; it is a visceral film filled with codas to the inescapable darker regions of nature: animal, elemental and the harshest of all, human. They all vibrate through Eggers’ signature warped soundscapes and Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough ’s brooding score, as ambient reverbs and decaying delays reach back toward primordial origins. The trippy hypnotic dreamscapes attempt a similar reach: the crack VFX team render Amleth’s family tree, an ever-evolving stand-in for divine rule, as a blue glowing arterial fern arising from his heart while connecting to ours. It’s one of the many magical tendrils intertwining, and sometimes knotting up, “The Northman,” a film where Björk portrays a blind seer pointing Amleth toward a sword with a dull-less blade and an unquenchable thirst for death. 

David Lowery ’s “ The Green Knight ” will probably serve as an all-too-easy comparison for many. But “The Northman” operates on a different emotional spectrum. This is a story of blind ambition stretched toward morally oblique ends in a world that prizes such malleability. That doesn’t mean these flawed characters don’t see themselves on the side of right. A virtuous anger fuels Amleth. And in a culture that’s weeded out male vulnerability, it’s down to Skarsgård to translate this man’s repressed emotions to a palpable rage. His romance with Olga ( Anya Taylor-Joy , reuniting with Eggers), an enslaved potion maker equally searching for revenge against Fjölnir, isn’t filled with amorous sweet nothings. You show love, you make the erotic a reality, and allow your horny rage to take centerstage by killing. And Amleth does plenty of blade swinging. These are fully committed performances by Skarsgård, Taylor-Joy, and especially Kidman, in a period piece filled with outright absurdity and silly suggestive one-liners.      

In that regard, “The Northman” often stumbles when it searches for profundity. As much as Eggers and his co-writer, the poet and novelist Sjón (“Lamb”), want to interrogate the place of women in these myths, that component bobs unmoored just below the surface. Outside of one spell, Olga remains within the confines of genre conventions without wholly subverting them. The last act is a slog, composed of a couple false endings hoping to attain a poetic plain. The final showdown between Fjölnir and Amleth, in the mouth of a volcano, in fact, is somehow anti-climactic. Certainly, the scene aims to explain the ways a hero’s journey, the expectation of fulfilling one’s destiny, no matter the consequences, carries a toxic burden, but the sentiment doesn’t translate in the overstated molten brouhaha.

Instead, this gory Viking tale works when considering its parts, but never really as a whole. The parts, however, are so thrilling, so uniquely calibrated to feverish, determined ends, that they elevate the entire film. Because how can one complain about the “too muchness” of the Valkyries? How can one scoff at the dizzying, unexplainable flights of magic? Where would the fun be in that? “The Northman” makes you happy it exists, even if you’re not totally happy with it. 

In theaters exclusively on April 22.   

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the  New York Times ,  IndieWire , and  Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the  Los Angeles Times , and  Rolling Stone  about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

• Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth
• Nicole Kidman as Queen Gudrún
• Claes Bang as Fjölnir the Brotherless
• Ethan Hawke as King Aurvandil War-Raven
• Anya Taylor-Joy as Olga of the Birch Forest
• Gustav Lindh as Thórir the Proud
• Elliott Rose as Gunnar
• Willem Dafoe as Heimir the Fool
• Björk as The Seeress
• Rebecca Ineson as Halla the Maiden
• Kate Dickie as Halldora the Pict
• Ralph Ineson as Captain Volodymyr

Director of Photography

• Jarin Blaschke
• Louise Ford
• Robert Eggers

Original Music Composer

• Robin Carolan
• Sebastian Gainsborough

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The Northman First Reviews: Bold, Unflinching, Visually Breathtaking

Critics say robert eggers' viking revenge tale boasts his trademark mysticism and sense of atmosphere, but it's a brutal, invigorating spectacle that's his most accessible film yet..

TAGGED AS: Action , Film , films , movie , movies

Robert Eggers , the bold visionary behind The Witch and The Lighthouse , is back with another ambitiously accurate period piece in The Northman . Starring Alexander Skarsgård as a Hamlet-esque Viking and Nicole Kidman as his mother, it is said to be the filmmaker’s most accessible yet, in part because it’s an historical action movie with a relatively sizable budget. The first reviews of The Northman are mostly very positive, with critics highlighting the performances and the craftsmanship, which come together in a spectacular blockbuster unlike any we’ve gotten in a long time.

Here’s what critics are saying about The Northman :

Is this one of the most unique films of the year?

It’s been a minute since we had something like it. It’s bold, gritty, and just downright awesome. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

While it’s a story you’ve seen before, you’ve never seen it like this. – Germain Lussier, io9.com

It is invigorating to see a studio-backed piece that is allowed to be uncompromisingly grim and savage. – Michelle Kisner, The Movie Sleuth

Among the best films I’ve seen in the last few years. It’s a stone-cold masterpiece. – Chris Bumbray, JoBlo’s Movie Network

The Northman feels unusually thin, with less meat on its bones than 2007’s schlocky Pathfinder or your basic Conan movie. – Peter Debruge, Variety

How does it compare to Robert Eggers’ other films?

A considerable step up in scope. – Jordan Raup, The Film Stage

With The Northman , he delivers what might be his most grounded and straightforward story thus far. – Patrick Cavanaugh, ComicBook.com

It makes the freaky artisanal horror that put director Robert Eggers on the map — The Witch and The Lighthouse — look like Disney movies. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

It’s less resonant than Eggers’ debut film, The Witch . – Katie Rife, Polygon

If there’s one thing The Northman is missing from the rest of Eggers’ oeuvre, it is that lack of madness that made parts of The Witch and The Lighthouse almost feel like a catharsis. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

It lacks the element of surprise that made The Witch and The Lighthouse feel like instant classics. – Peter Debruge, Variety

(Photo by Aidan Monaghan/©Focus Features)

Will mainstream audiences enjoy it?

They will. Because this is the kind of filmmaking that rips you out of your body so hard that you’re liable to forget what year it is. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

It’s his most accessible, and certainly the most exciting… The Northman isn’t a movie for everybody, but it’s the Robert Eggers movie that’s probably for the widest audience. – Germain Lussier, io9.com

Eggers’ most accessible film yet… though the bone-crunching gore and dashes of cosmic mystery prevent The Northman from being anything close to “mainstream.” – Hoai-Tran Bui, Slashfilm

The Northman is destined to be a bit of a cult favorite, but it may also have a chance at more. – Joey Magidson, Awards Radar

Eggers, who let his freak flag fly with A24, has reverted to a more conventional mode for this relatively mainstream Focus Features release, eschewing the elevated language of The Lighthouse . – Peter Debruge, Variety

Will it appeal to fans of history and historical epics?

Meticulously researched, it makes other Viking shows and movies look cartoonish by comparison. – Chris Bumbray, JoBlo’s Movie Network

The sets and costumes crafted by Eggers regulars Craig Lathrop and Linda Muir put any of the film’s contemporaries to shame (yes, even Gladiator … especially Gladiator ). – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

In terms of making history exciting and engrossing, The Northman is about as titillating as gateway drugs get. – Katie Rife, Polygon

What other comparisons does The Northman invite?

It’s as if The Green Knight got passed through a “bro” filter. – Hoai-Tran Bui, Slashfilm

It’s an audaciously bonkers movie that keeps threatening to careen off into some kind of weird no man’s land where Game of Thrones meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail . – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Feels more like a heavy-metal music video, a testosterone-fueled melange of fire, blood, nudity, and screaming, fueled by hatred and hallucinatory shamanic rituals. – Katie Rife, Polygon

This [Shakespearean] drama very much takes Amleth away from the thespian green room and simplifies the story along Lion King lines (no Hakuna Matata though). – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

The movie that The Northman most resembles is The Revenant , an impressively orchestrated marathon of misery that prioritized directorial skill over audience engagement. – Peter Debruge, Variety

How is Alexander Skarsgård in the lead?

Skarsgård has never been better or more suited to a role. – Hoai-Tran Bui, Slashfilm

Prince Amleth is the hunky, heroically vengeful killing machine with a heart that Skarsgård was born to play. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth should become his definitive role. It’s one of those unforgettable performances that seems bound to be iconic. – Chris Bumbray, JoBlo’s Movie Network

A superb Skarsgård balances the bodily vigorousness required with the shattered innocence that defines his part. – Carlos Aguilar, The Playlist

Muscles only go so far to compensate for the strange emptiness behind young Skarsgård’s eyes. – Peter Debruge, Variety

Will it particularly delight True Blood fans?

Longtime fans will get a kick out of him tapping into the cultural roots of his ancient True Blood vampire, Eric Northman, too. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

It’s truly a full-circle moment. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

How is Nicole Kidman?

It’s a role that truly highlights the range that Kidman is capable of. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

Kidman delivers some of her best work. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

It’s Nicole Kidman as Queen Gudrún who really steals the show. She has some incredibly intense, emotionally complex moments, and you believe every second. – Germain Lussier, io9.com

She delivers a performance so feral it seems to shake the very foundations of the frame she inhabits. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

Kidman is a hoot, juggling fire and ice in an enjoyably over-the-top turn. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

How is the action?

The fight sequences are incredible. Meticulously choreographed and shot with purpose. The battles are bloody and intense. It’s not overly stylized. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

The choreography of the combat scenes — both the staging and the shooting, in long, unbroken takes — is mind-blowing. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Like a grim, grounded war movie, in which the battle scenes play out in a slow, weighty, almost plodding manner, meticulously choreographed to be as brutish and realistic as possible. – Hoai-Tran Bui, Slashfilm

The inevitable final showdown [is] one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen on film. It’s as if George Lucas filmed the finale of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith for real. – Germain Lussier, io9.com

There’s a brilliant set piece where Eggers shoots a Berserker siege in a single, unbroken take that will be discussed for years to come. – Chris Bumbray, JoBlo’s Movie Network

The Northman is never dull. The sheer muscularity of Eggers’ direction denies it that chance… also, someone gets decapitated like every 10 minutes. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

How does the movie look?

Visually, The Northman is breathtaking combining beautiful vistas with fantastical imagery. – Michelle Kisner, The Movie Sleuth

Visually, The Northman is stunning, with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke boosting the film’s color palette with variations on light, shadow, and striking gray tones. – Mae Abdulbaki, Screen Rant

Blaschke’s cinematography is also noteworthy for its approach to instances of grace, coating them in either dazzling moonlight or the fantastical color palette of the northern lights. – Carlos Aguilar, The Playlist

Your jaw is so often left gaping in awe from its stunning cinematography and in terror from its ferocity to the point you might just resign yourself to keeping it open for the duration of the film. – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

The Northman’ s landscape imagery feels like a step down for a filmmaker who once seemed intent on imbuing his settings with an unnerving sense of character. – Mark Hanson, Slant Magazine

Are there any major problems?

Fissures do present themselves — not least of all a recurring CG-heavy vision of a family tree that plays like unnecessary connect-the-dots material to appease a wider audience. – Jordan Raup, The Film Stage

It’s somewhat disappointing that The Northman reveals itself to be so programmatic… Eggers’s film is sometimes frustratingly shackled to the obligations of plot. – Mark Hanson, Slant Magazine

The Northman lacks a sense of nuance in its characters and in its story… It barely scratches the surface of its story, leaving the audience with crumbs rather than a full feast. – Mae Abdulbaki, Screen Rant

Every character has a chance to shine individually. However, sometimes the relationships between them are a tad underbaked. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

The Scandinavian accents coming out of the mouths of actors like Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy and Ethan Hawke risk bringing on a House of Gucci trauma relapse. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

The pacing has a rocky start. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

Is this the kind of alternative blockbuster we need right now?

What Eggers has ambitiously crafted lands as an invigorating beacon for an industry in need of studio fare with substantial ideas and artistry. – Carlos Aguilar, The Playlist

The film makes you appreciate how seldom we get to see a big, noisy, brawling spectacle these days that’s grounded not in comic-book superheroes and villains but in culturally specific history. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

The simple fact that financiers had the chutzpah to bankroll such a big swing in the face of our blockbuster-or-bust theatrical climate would have felt like a (pyrrhic) victory against the forces of corporate homogenization, no matter who was behind the camera. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

In a wide release landscape of easy-to-please, vaporous entertainment, such feats should be celebrated. – Jordan Raup, The Film Stage

It’s a big risk to spend that much cash on an auteur-driven historical epic at a time when historical epics have largely fallen by the wayside. But what a beautiful risk it is. I call upon Odin: may The Northman make a billion dollars. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

The Northman opens in theaters on April 22, 2022.

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‘The Northman’ Review: Danish Premodern

Alexander Skarsgard, Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicole Kidman star in Robert Eggers’s bloody Viking revenge saga.

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By A.O. Scott

“The Northman” tells a very old story — maybe the same old story. A young prince seeks to avenge the murder of his father, the king, whose killer has usurped the throne and married the prince’s mother. That’s “Hamlet,” of course, but Robert Eggers’s new film isn’t another Shakespeare screen adaptation, bristling with Elizabethan eloquence, high-toned acting and complex, uncannily modern psychology.

Eggers, who wrote the screenplay with the Icelandic novelist and playwright Sjon, has conjured this bloody saga out of the ancient Scandinavian narratives that supplied Shakespeare’s source material. His raw material, you might say, since “The Northman” insists on the primal, brutal, atavistic dimensions of the tale. Amleth, as he is called, is no student philosopher, temporizing over the nuances of being and nonbeing. He is a berserker, a howling warrior with ripped abs, superhero combat skills and a righteous cause for his endless blood lust.

This is what I mean by the same old story. In modern movies, even more than in 17th-century English plays, revenge can seem like the most — maybe the only — credible motive for heroic action. Just ask the Batman . Truth and justice are divisive abstractions, too easily deconstructed or dressed up in gaudy ideological colors. Love is problematic. Payback, in contrast, is clean and inarguable, even if it leaves a mess in its wake.

“Avenge father. Save mother. Kill uncle,” young Amleth repeats to himself as he flees the scene of his father’s death. These words propel him into manhood, as he grows from a wide-eyed boy played by Oscar Novak into a cold-eyed marauder played by Alexander Skarsgard.

Amleth inhabits a world whose operating principle is cruelty, and Eggers’s accomplishment lies in his fastidious, fanatical rendering of that world, down to its bed linens and cooking utensils. If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons, you may have encountered a dungeon master who took the game very, very seriously, attacking the task of fantasy world-building with excessive scholarly rigor and over-the-top imaginative zeal. That kind of player can be intimidating, but also a lot more fun than the average weekend geek.

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The Northman Reviews

Epic, brutally violent, nuanced, and dreamlike, The Northman is a showcase for a unique directorial voice worth celebrating.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 3, 2024

Neither tragedy nor Eggers skimp on violence, screams, sweat, blood and swords, along with ambitious mise en scène, some of the best photography and one of the most epic soundtracks of the year. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Dec 19, 2023

Filled with stunning cinematography, the film is an intense, immersive, sometimes surreal, descent into an otherworldly milieu of folkloric horror and medieval barbarism.

Full Review | Oct 31, 2023

As a bloody and most certainly trippy revenge tale, The Northman is astounding in many places. Eggers may not have created the ultimate Viking tale, but he has crafted an astonishing spectacle that combines his established style with something larger.

Full Review | Sep 17, 2023

Eggers’ visual style is a roller coaster of primordial, oneiric imagery of an epic, wild landscape, turbulent supernatural forces and untamed nature sans any whiff of domestication.

Full Review | Aug 16, 2023

Robert Eggers has crafted one for the ages… The Northman is a cinematic epic that blew my mind from start to finish. Lavishing cinematography that brings to life this era, visceral violence that adds to the world, & a jaw dropping third act

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

The Northman is an incredibly gifted film full of hostility, genealogy, strength, and desire.

Violent and powerful from start to finish, The Northman tells an epic, period accurate Viking tale that easily immerses its audience throughout the entire run-time.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 25, 2023

The Northman is a story that’s been told many times over, and save for showcasing the stunning scenery of Ireland, this adaptation is nothing to write home about.

The Northman isn’t trying to elevate horror nor dismantle fetishistic fantasies. It’s a fully-formed exercise in realigning blockbuster pictures back to the way they should be: big, visually breathtaking, and bolstered by a unique vision.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 21, 2023

By the time the end credits hit, you will be waiting for it to begin anew, and that is one of the highest compliments you could give a movie of this size and breadth.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 21, 2023

It provides all the weirdness, gore, beauty and singularity that you would expect from this director’s take on a Viking tale of vengeance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 9, 2023

The Northman’s carefully choreographed, single-shot takes and startlingly lit close-ups blow the spatially disorienting and over-edited style of so many contemporary action films completely out of the fjord.

Full Review | May 9, 2023

The Northman is practically bursting with testosterone. The story of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), a Viking Prince hellbent on revenge, Robert Eggers‘s third film is essentially a case study in the destructive nature of unyielding masculinity.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Feb 18, 2023

Northman is one of Robert Egger best films. The scope, the scale, the atmospheric building of Norse mythology is groundbreaking. Along with some insanely well acted performances and beyond thrilling action and revenge based story. Must Watch Masterpiece!

Full Review | Original Score: 9.5/10 | Dec 26, 2022

The Northman creates a unique saga that taps into something truly primal before one hell of an ending.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Dec 4, 2022

An intoxicating and epic blend of violence, mysticism, and breathtaking visuals.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 11, 2022

Spectacle, pageantry and myth combine with blood, mud and abs for a dazzling, uproarious Viking spree in which Alexander Skarsgård seeks to avenge the murder of his father with the aid of Anya Taylor-Joy and Icelandic national treasure Björk.

Full Review | Oct 3, 2022

The Northman stands as a stark reminder that there is still a place in cinema for gorgeous, inspired odysseys, rife with literary allusions, deep-seated spiritual meanings, and an exploration of complex human emotions.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Sep 24, 2022

This brutally violent, yet soaringly lyrical action epic is quite unlike anything captured on screen before.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2022

Live Coverage

Review: Robert Eggers’ mighty Viking epic ‘The Northman’ puts the art before the Norse

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Not long into Robert Eggers’ “The Northman,” a mad and mesmerizing song of Iceland and fire, the camera plunges down into darkness, as if it had suddenly been swallowed up by the Earth. It’s AD 895, on a frigid North Atlantic island, and we’re following a scrawny young Viking prince, Amleth (Oscar Novak), and his scraggly bearded father, King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), as they descend into a firelit temple, where the royal stripling is led through a muddy, bloody rite of manhood. Amid much growling, howling, floating and farting, Aurvandil predicts his own impending demise and makes Amleth vow to avenge him — an oath sealed in blood and destined to be fulfilled with great geysers of gore and lava.

There are many such grim prophecies and elemental eruptions in “The Northman,” starting with the movie’s arresting opening shot of a volcano belching smoke, fire and voice-over. (I didn’t catch every word, but the volcano might as well be saying, “Behold. Cinema.”) Aurvandil’s fatalistic vision will soon be proved correct: After returning home from distant battlefields, the king is brutally slain by his brother, Fjölnir (Claes Bang, “The Square” ). Amleth, having witnessed his uncle’s betrayal, barely escapes alive but vows to return and avenge his father, as promised, and save his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), whom Fjölnir has taken as his wife. And return he will decades later, now played by a strapping, towering Alexander Skarsgård in full-blown Old Norse berserker mode, who tears into this role like a man — and an actor — seizing hold of his destiny.

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If you sense some mimicry in this madness, well spotted: The legend of Prince Amleth was the direct inspiration for “Hamlet,” though Skarsgård’s mighty warrior also hails from a cinematic pantheon of vengeance seekers broad enough to include Conan the Barbarian , Maximus and Inigo Montoya . If that makes “The Northman” sound derivative, it is: a witchy brew of Old Norse mythology, Hollywood pageantry and proto-Shakespearean revenge epic.

But Skarsgård (also one of the movie’s producers) has found an ideal collaborator in Eggers, a director sufficiently steeped in film history to know the difference between inspiration and imitation. Like his memorable period freakouts “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse,” though on a vastly more ambitious scale, “The Northman” is both a dazzling display of film craft and a sly retooling of genre, a movie that delights in fulfilling certain conventions while turning others on their artfully severed heads.

Robert Eggers knew he’d have to fight for his vision of ‘The Northman.’ The result was worth it

Robert Eggers makes his most ambitious film yet with Viking saga ‘The Northman,’ combining historical accuracy with a fantasy mysticism.

April 22, 2022

And so while it’s clear enough how Amleth’s story will end, the long arc of his journey takes unpredictable, even unsettling turns. When we first meet Skarsgård’s fully grown Amleth, he’s joined a band of murderous marauders, clad in wolf skins as they bring a Slavic village to its knees. Eggers, shooting nearly every scene in fluid, intricately choreographed long takes, gives the action the deliberation and intensity of an ancient ritual. (The sweepingly immersive cinematography is by Jarin Blaschke, the spare, purposeful editing by Louise Ford.) This violence is the way of the world, the movie suggests, and the atrocities we’re witnessing — a burning hut evokes the wartime conflagrations of Elem Klimov’s “Come and See” — are as unexceptional as they are unbearable.

Amleth, courting and thwarting our sympathies at will, is a very strong link in an endless chain of death. (He’s not alone, to judge by an end-credits crawl loaded with names like “Hrólfur Split-Lip” and “Thórfinnr Tooth-Gnasher.”) As Amleth goes on his latest feral rampage, you can’t help but wonder about how many children he’s orphaning and how many spinoff revenge dramas he’s setting in motion.

And Skarsgård, a charmer with an undercurrent of aloofness, is perfectly cast as a warrior so numb to carnage that it takes a supernatural intervention to remind him of his sworn mission: Fjölnir, Amleth learns, has been dethroned and fled with Gudrún and his sons to Iceland. It’s only fitting that this news is delivered by a witchy seeress played by Iceland’s biggest star, Björk, resplendent in oracular blue lighting and a Cher-worthy seashell-ringed headdress.

Björk is one of two prominent Icelandic talents pressed into service here. The other is poet and novelist Sjón, who co-wrote the screenplay with Eggers (and who supplied lyrics for Björk’s last major movie, 2000’s “Dancer in the Dark” ). Their involvement speaks to Eggers’ characteristic insistence on verisimilitude, born of an obsessive, research-driven approach to filmmaking that might seem persnickety if it weren’t so passionate. A production and costume designer before he turned to directing, Eggers has become our great builder of worlds in extremis: After the spooky Puritan New England of “The Witch” and the lonely maritime outpost of “The Lighthouse,” he once again conjures a nightmarish vision of humanity on the precipice.

But despite the fastidiousness of “The Northman’s” animal-pelts-and-chain-mail aesthetic, the filmmaking feels freer, looser and nuttier this time around — and not just because the spotty visual record of ancient Viking culture leaves plenty to an artist’s imagination. (The director’s splendid regular collaborators include production designer Craig Lathrop and costume designer Linda Muir.) Happily, Eggers makes movies, not research papers, and his sweet spot is that zone where his art-film idiosyncrasies merge with a genuine flair for Hollywood showmanship. Witness the self-consciously florid dialogue, sometimes poetically heightened to the point of torture. Witness too the inspired scenery chewing and quasi-Scandinavian accents indulged by Hawke (gone too soon) and especially Kidman, whose performance as the seemingly demure Gudrún turns out to be one of the movie’s most deliciously barbed surprises.

You may recall that Skarsgård and Kidman play a troubled couple in the HBO miniseries “Big Little Lies,” an association that gives Amleth and Gudrún’s eventual scenes together that much more of a feverish Oedipal charge. But Eggers is in no mood to hasten the family reunions and revelations, or to blow his protagonist’s cover. Amleth arrives on Fjölnir’s farm a slave, having stowed away in a boat full of war prisoners, and he’s wily enough to pass himself off for a while as a hard worker and seemingly loyal family servant. He and an enslaved ally, Olga (a fine Anya Taylor-Joy, reteaming with Eggers after “The Witch”), bide their time and share their bodies and secrets, laying the groundwork for a campaign of deadly sabotage against Fjölnir’s household.

Those schemes, when they come to pass, are initially attributed to the work of evil spirits. And while Amleth will eventually take his rightful credit as the author of Fjölnir’s pain, the spirit world — the raw material of the Icelandic myths that are this story’s lifeblood — is of supreme importance here. Eggers, plunging headlong into his material, draws no distinction between fantasy and reality, though as a storyteller, he is naturally inclined toward an ardent defense of paganism in all its forms. Just as “The Witch” critiqued 17th-century Puritan repression with a gleeful embrace of nude bonfire-dancing devilry, so “The Northman,” with its ominous ravens, bearded he-witches and helmeted Valkyries, treats Viking mythology as its own living, breathing, dazzling reality.

You may find yourself longing for more of that fantasy, perhaps as a distraction from the inexorable death march that Amleth’s journey is destined to become. Eggers, who likes to conjure elaborate visions only to attack their foundations from within, works hard to inflect that journey with a self-critical spirit. There’s a productive tension at the heart of “The Northman,” a tug-of-war between the Hollywood revenge-epic tradition from which it superficially hails and the sharper, more subversive dismantling of simplistic payback fantasies it wants to be.

The final passages are laced with surprises you may or may not see coming, bitter reversals of perspective that complicate — but don’t entirely mitigate — the pleasures of watching a wronged man settle an old score. Bang makes Fjölnir an implacable brute, but not an unsympathetic one. The same is true of Skarsgård, whose career-igniting role on “True Blood,” a vampire with Viking roots and the name of Eric Northman, feels like both a sequel and a warm-up act to this one. Amleth may be no unblemished hero, but with a bulging, blood-caked torso and a willingness to storm the gates of hell, he can still lead you on a trek straight to cinematic Valhalla.

‘The Northman’

Rating: R, for strong bloody violence, some sexual content and nudity Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes Playing: Starts April 22 in general release

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‘The Northman’: A Brutal, Bloody, Kinda Bonkers Tale of Viking-on-Viking Crime

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

The Northman , Robert Eggers’ biggest and most expansive (and expensive) feature to date, is also his best so far. It’s an oft-stunning visual feast and an entertaining peek into Eggers’ instincts as a choreographer not only of historical detail but of bloody action. It is also an instructive example of how the most visionary intentions can’t always enliven an otherwise rote story. The Northman opens in AD 895, when Amleth, the Northman of the title, is a boy (played at this stage by Oscar Novak). But it is primarily set in 914, during the latter stages of the settlement of Iceland, before the establishment of a parliament. Lawlessness rules the way.  Spare us your wild West and give us, instead, your wild, ravenous, revenge-seeking North. 

Amleth’s father is King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke), freshly home from battle — and suffering from an injury which, if not a mortal wound, has invited some dark reflection on mortality from Aurvandill’s part. “I watched his innocence tonight,” the warring king says to his wife, Queen Gudrún (an underutilized Nicole Kidman), of their son. It is time to initiate their boy into the ways of being king. So begins the first thrilling ritual we see in this movie. Amleth and Aurvandill crawl down into a cave, joining the fool of the kingdom, Heimir (a zany, senseless Willem Dafoe), in a howling, sputtering ritual of man-making, getting down on all fours like dogs as they inhale hallucinogenic smoke from henbane seeds and recite some of the sayings of Odin (the Hávamál).

Aurvandill’s sudden concern for showing his son the way of the throne in this rite is well-timed. Soon, the king will be betrayed by his brother, Fjölnir (a royally maned Claes Bang); an argument will ensue; Amleth will be rendered into an orphan, his mother into the unwitting queen of the man who’s stealing the kingdom from her son. Fjölnir, we learn, is a “bastard” — not in the line of succession. He also thinks Amleth has been, as they say, taken care of. He’s wrong.

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Only three movies into his feature directing career, Eggers has rightfully earned a reputation for doing his research. The Witch , from 2015, was set in the New England of the 1630s, and seemingly every detail of its presentation, from the library-antique style and rhythm of its dialogue to the painstaking reconstructions of its built environments, sang with his obsessive attention to detail — so much so that it nearly overwhelmed the movie. For The Lighthouse (2019), set in the 1880s, Eggers spent a handsome chunk of the movie’s budget on the construction of an actual, 70-foot tall lighthouse, within and around which he set the movie’s strange, confined story. For that movie, Willem Dafoe had to learn how to knit. None of which is remarkable on its own. Actors acquire practical skills for movies all the time. And James Cameron built a partial model of the Titanic only to sink it. For this level of care to embed itself in our idea of the director, though, is something else — a feat of canny marketing, for one thing. 

The Northman is, unabashedly, a revenge tale. Amleth the boy will become Amleth the muscled, scorched-earth man: thwarted Viking royalty who, you’d better believe it, plans to avenge what he lost. Alexander Skarsgård, who once played Tarzan, has done the mean, lean, shirtless warrior thing before. It helps to have an actor who makes the feat of this accomplishment feel plausibly heroic, perceivably vicious. The Northman will see him falling in with a group of Viking-era berserkers, sheathed in the skin of a wolf, before having an encounter with a seeress (a mystically appropriate Björk) who spells out the story of his fate. Fate takes him to Iceland, as an enslaved laborer, and he works his way up into Fjölnir’s confidence through his wits and might. He befriends and falls for Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy, who starred in The Witch and here, as there, drums up the sense of uncanny mystery that Eggers needs). Amleth communes with ravens and wolves, wends his way through a series of challenges to his will and his power. The Northman is not a cliffhanger, exactly. You know where the story is going. You can also, from the bare outline of the plot, guess where it came from. Amleth is a historical Viking warrior, described in the 13th-century historian Saxo Grammaticus’ The History of the Danes . Amleth, the name, resembles Hamlet for a reason: Shakespeare was influenced by the violent hero’s story. This movie’s particular chapter isn’t in Grammaticus’ account, however. It’s more so a plausible missing chapter, which Eggers co-wrote with the Icelandic poet Sjón. Still, for a story dreamed up by its makers, it starts to bear some cumbersome familiarity. Even the challenges that fall into Amleth’s path, such as the acquisition of a uniquely powerful sword, are a little deadened by obvious outcomes. Some movies can do this and not suffer for it. Northman ’s cutting depth of detail almost longs for some fresh backbone of a story. The movie’s carefully constructed cliff-top forts and beauteous locales, its dangerous headlands and rolling green hills, are all so fecund — boons to the imagination. Eggers’ movie is best when it feels most complicit in that imagination: When it dives into its mystical visions and unnameable powers. Eggers abandons stylish modern crutches, like handheld cameras during his battle scenes, and instead resorts to smooth, eerie long takes, images that roam through the action, not with a sense of hands-off distance, but rather with a patient eagerness to lap up the sights, soak in the bloodletting. Nighttime scenes set outdoors are spookily drained of color and forced to evoke the wondrous, ominous purity of moonlight. 

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It’s disorienting. At times the movie tugs us back into its plot in ways that nearly disrupt the natural sense of curiosity Eggers makes us feel about this world. His sense of control lends itself to incredible, singular visions — a strong case, if nothing else, for selling edibles in movie theaters. Yet control winds up feeling, at times, like a limit. The story almost feels too linear for its visions: The attractive shock of the design demands plotless immersion — but wait, there’s an incesty plot-twist to get to, and wait, some of those people lurking in the background have got to die first. For a deeply violent guy, Amleth is actually quite morally grounded. He always has his reasons; even his time with the berserkers is intriguingly focused, constricted by his own moral restraint. His main identity, as a hero, is as a man who accepts his fate — owns it, lives up to it, trusts that what is meant to happen will happen. 

In a recent profile of Eggers , the New Yorker claimed that The Northman might be “the most accurate Viking movie ever made,” and seems to mean this as a compliment. The truth is that Eggers pulls off something more interesting than accuracy, in part by abandoning what could ever possibly be known. The finer touches may or may not be rooted in historical truth, but their sum, at its best, can make your head spin. Ritual is, here as before in Eggers’ work, a grand occasion for the movie to pause, set aside the plot, and dive into the quirks and kinks and historial behavior. One of the best ideas in Eggers’ work to date is that the past is so much wilder than the present allows itself to be. That kingmaking ritual underground, between father and son, is a breathtaking feat of conceptual vertigo, a cascade of attractively nightmarish visions slipping down in front of our eyes like a reel of images. The costumes, the sets, the careful chaos: You could throw all of this onscreen and call it a movie, but Eggers routinely makes it feel flesh-born, equally grounded in the inconceivable and the plausible. You needn’t know that the crowns atop the royals’ heads don’t strictly fit the actual period to be taken with the curiosity of the choice. And even if you attribute the choice to style, rather than research, that style pulls you into the folds of a story that can almost feel too dangerous to watch. The violence gets gruesome. Children clubbed in the head, villages raided, homes leveled by fire, bodies battered by the elements. We don’t need to ask why we’re watching. In its own cruel way, it’s all so daringly fun. 

What Eggers seems to know is that the tales of Grammaticus and others were tales spun in a Christian era, heavily reliant upon prior stories and myths but nonetheless distanced, by religion, from their more pagan roots. That gap could feel like a domestication of some more unwieldy spiritual power. Eggers wants to remind us that it’s all a little unhinged. The plot of The Northman does eventually make strides toward that what-the-fuckery, but the surprise comes from a couple of characters unexpectedly turning out to be freaks, which is perfectly fine for this movie. So much of Amleth’s tale is tied down to his fate (which is to say, Bjork shows up to predict the rest of the movie, and the movie proves her right) that by the time we’re seeing two men battle to the death within a volcano, we’ve learned to reorient our expectations. We’re so used to the fire and brimstone and predictable largesse of sword-and-sandals stories like these that it starts to feel like enough for a movie to simply amaze us. More than anything, The Northman made me wonder what Eggers would do with a historically blank canvas, an act of storytelling divorced from old modes like the revenge plot or witchy self-discovery. This isn’t something that every obsessively detailed director makes us feel. It is, specifically, something that Eggers’ movies make me crave. More than his previous works — which also owe much of their power not to lived reality but to the disconcerting tug of mythology — Northman makes a case for what Eggers might pull off were he encouraged to drift even more completely into the realm of imagination. It’s the fantasies and visions that stand out. Less so the “story.” The Northman is as off-the-rails, internal, and speculative as Eggers has ever been. The craft speaks for itself. The next step for Eggers is to really let it fly.

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Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy and Ethan Hawke also star in this big, bloody medieval Viking saga of fate, family and revenge.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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It’s been a while since we’ve had an all-out blood-and-guts battle orgy in which warriors outfitted in sackcloth and animal skins hurl themselves into the fray, wielding swords and blazing torches, shields, hatchets and daggers, while bellowing dialogue that mostly begins and ends with “RAAARRRGGGHHH!” There’s a lot of that in The Northman , a brawny fever dream which makes the freaky artisanal horror that put director Robert Eggers on the map — The Witch and The Lighthouse — look like Disney movies. To use a term from a ritualistic fireside chant where Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth blurs the line between man and beast, this is the untamed “berserker” of Norse legends.

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Navigating the leap from his modestly budgeted previous instant-cult films to this large-scale $90 million bloodbath for Focus Features , Eggers is nothing if not fearless. Benefitting again from the exactingly detailed work of production designer Craig Lathrop and costumer Linda Muir, the director conjures an immersive, pungently evocative atmosphere that catapults us back to the turn of the 10th century, a dark and viscerally violent past in which human savagery and the supernatural co-exist.

The Northman

Release date : Friday, April 22 Cast : Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Björk Director : Robert Eggers Screenwriters : Sjón, Robert Eggers

The inadvertently campy dialogue in the script Eggers co-wrote with Icelandic novelist and poet Sjón ( Lamb ) quite often prompts giggles, and the Scandinavian accents coming out of the mouths of actors like Nicole Kidman , Anya Taylor-Joy and Ethan Hawke risk bringing on a House of Gucci trauma relapse. It’s an audaciously bonkers movie that keeps threatening to careen off into some kind of weird no man’s land where Game of Thrones meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail . And that’s even before Björk drops by as a witchy seeress, outfitted in wicker work, seashells and beads.

But The Northman ’s marauding energy holds you hostage and Prince Amleth is the hunky, heroically vengeful killing machine with a heart that Skarsgård was born to play. Longtime fans will get a kick out of him tapping into the cultural roots of his ancient True Blood vampire, Eric Northman, too.

The screenplay draws from both Norse myths and Icelandic family sagas, building on the Scandinavian legend of Amleth that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet . The prologue takes place in the fictitious North Atlantic island kingdom of Hrafnsey, where King Aurvandil (Hawke), aka War-Raven, arrives home to much fanfare. The gash in his guts inflicted by a foe in battle prompts him to prepare the 10-year-old Amleth (Oscar Novak) to take over the throne, despite the objections of Queen Gudrún (Kidman) that their son is just a boy. Amleth’s transcendental initiation involves crawling around on all fours underground with his father, howling like wolves. Also, belching, farting, levitating and accessing disturbing visions via Aurvandil’s wound.

No sooner has Amleth sworn to avenge his father should he die by an enemy’s sword than the boy witnesses his murder at the hands of his uncle Fjölnir ( Claes Bang ), whose friskiness with the Queen has already been joked about by the shamanistic court fool, Heimir (Willem Dafoe).

“Bring me the boy’s head,” Fjölnir commands his men, accompanied by the shrieking strings and pounding drums of Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough’s hard-driving score. But Amleth, after watching the slaughter of male villagers, abduction of the women and the Queen slung over Fjölnir’s shoulder and hauled off screaming, escapes by boat. He vows to rescue his mother, kill his uncle and avenge his father.

A couple decades later, Amleth has transformed into a muscle-bound man harnessing the spirit of both a wolf and a bear. He’s rage personified, traveling the Land of the Rus with a pack of Viking raiders that seemingly never met a Slavic settlement they couldn’t plunder. But Björk’s earth-mother seeress recognizes him as the lost prince and reminds him of his fate. Learning that Fjölnir was driven from the kingdom he usurped and fled to a remote agrarian community in Iceland, Amleth boards a slave ship headed there to supply labor.

Anya Taylor-Joy plays a fellow passenger who knows a good hook-up when she sees one. “I am Olga of the Birch Forest,” she says by way of introduction, adding that while he has the strength to break men’s bones, she has the cunning to break their minds. Both get taken on at Fjölnir’s farm, where Olga gradually gains Amleth’s trust and he reveals his plan to murder his uncle and save his mother, whom he believes is only feigning love for her abductor for the sake of their young son (Elliott Rose).

Eggers’ films have shared a fascination with the magical properties of animals — a goat in The Witch (love you, Black Phillip), a cursed seagull in The Lighthouse . The occult fauna this time is wolf cubs and ravens, the former leading Amleth to find a massive sword of the undead, known as The Night Blade; the latter getting busy with their beaks when he’s tortured and bound late in the game.

The storytelling accelerates as Amleth gets closer to his goal, wreaking carnage among his uncle’s men and sparking fear of a “distempered spirit” in their midst. The plotting becomes more frenetic though remains lucid, even if there are one or two arch moments that had me almost howling like a wolf.

Gudrún’s reunion with the son she long believed to be dead should have been a moment of high drama. But it’s hard not to laugh when Kidman, wearing Daryl Hannah’s old crimped hair from Splash and sporting a Natasha Fatale accent, greets a mighty silver blade at her throat with, “Your sword is long,” before engaging in some incestuous flirtation. When Fjölnir suffers a grievous loss and screams, “What evil is this?!” Gudrún shoots him a wide-eyed death stare and snaps, “Behave!” like she’s a Nordic Austin Powers.

The romance between Amleth and Olga also has time to blossom during all this, complete with a post-coital respite in the woods right out of John Boorman’s Excalibur . There’s also an interlude on a flying horse ridden by a fiery-eyed Valkyrie (Ineta Sliuzaite). But even as Amleth ensures the continuation of his bloodline, his deathly appointment with uncle Fjölnir at “the gates of hell” remains.

That would be the mouth of an active volcano, where they fight nude, as any self-respecting medieval warrior would, though their digitally erased penises make them look distractingly like Ken dolls. I could be wrong, but their smooth groins in the lava light look more like the result of studio interference than prudishness on the part of the actors or of a director so intent on presenting a world suspended between life and legend in all its gritty glory.

The film is shot by Eggers’ regular DP Jarin Blaschke, with restless propulsion and with a textured feel for the dramatic landscapes, lashed by rain, wind, snow and ice, or coated with mud and ash. The choreography of the combat scenes — both the staging and the shooting, in long, unbroken takes — is mind-blowing. Also fully enveloping is the dense sound design, with Viking Age instruments like the birch horn and bone flute heard alongside the thundering elements and the chaos of fighting.

The Northman is certainly a lot of movie, and while its hysterical intensity at times veers into overwrought silliness, it’s both unstinting and exhilarating in its depiction of a culture ruled by the cycles of violence. The cohesion of Eggers’ vision commands admiration, as does the commitment of his collaborators, both in front of and behind the camera.

Skarsgård, who has been working for more than a decade to develop a film project rooted in his childhood love of Viking myth and lore, has never been fiercer or more physically imposing. Taylor-Joy, who got her start in The Witch , is beguiling as Olga weaves baskets and plots havoc. (Her parents from that earlier film, Kate Dickie and Ralph Ineson, also make appearances.) Kidman is a hoot, juggling fire and ice in an enjoyably over-the-top turn. And if someone doesn’t cast Bang as a Bond nemesis or some other suitably elevated evildoer soon, then Hollywood just isn’t paying attention.

Whether you buy into Eggers’ insane epic, get high on its blood-drenched sorcery or roll your eyes at its excesses, the film makes you appreciate how seldom we get to see a big, noisy, brawling spectacle these days that’s grounded not in comic-book superheroes and villains but in culturally specific history. In other words, a work of bold imagination, not another offshoot of a familiar IP. That alone deserves respect.

Full credits

Distribution: Focus Features Production companies: New Regency, Square Peg Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Björk, Gustav Lindh, Elliott Rose, Oscar Novak, Kate Dickie, Ralph Ineson, Phill Martin, Eldar Skar, Olwen Fouéré, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Ineta Sliuzaite Director: Robert Eggers Screenwriters: Sjón, Robert Eggers Producers: Lars Knudsen, Mark Huffam, Robert Eggers, Alexander Skarsgård, Arnon Milchan Executive producers: Yariv Milchan, Michael Schaeffer, Sam Hanson, Thomas Benski Director of photography: Jarin Blaschke Production designer: Craig Lathrop Costume designer: Linda Muir Music: Robin Carolan, Sebastian Gainsborough Editor: Louise Ford

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The Northman review: Fear the reaper, when he is Skarsgård

Indie filmmaker Robert Eggers (The Witch) makes a play for the multiplex in his starry, bloody Viking epic.

Recently, a small ripple ran through social media when a series of posters for The Northman materialized in New York City subways with the title missing , a printing error that the internet reacted to with predictable glee. Some made quick work of Photoshop , slapping on winky stand-ins ( Tarzan , Finding Nemo 3 ); others tried more sincerely to provide their own loglines ("Like Waterworld 2 or something. Post-apocalyptic, but it's tribal." "Vikings? Vikings who are going through a really tough time.")

The Northman (in theaters April 22) is in fact a tough time for Vikings, though it's arguable whether they ever had any other kind. It is also, beneath the arthouse sheen of A24 and the raft of prestige weirdos — Anya Taylor-Joy , Willem Dafoe , Björk — on board, a fairly straightforward genre movie: A blood-soaked revenge saga somewhere between Clint Eastwood, Conan the Barbarian , and The Clan of the Cave Bear , with a heady glaze of metaphysical fantasy.

That it was made by writer-director Robert Eggers , who also helmed the 2015 Sundance fever dream The Witch and 2019's surreal sea-shanty chamber piece The Lighthouse , is less expected, though his imprint is all over the film — in its grand monologues and strange mythologies, the baroque, uncanny sense of world-building. What's less clear this time is whether any of it means anything, or is even really supposed to.

Alexander Skarsgård at least seems born to play Amleth, the deposed ninth-century warrior-prince whose betrayal as a child at the hands of his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang) leaves him shorn of both his parents ( Nicole Kidman and Ethan Hawke ) and his North Atlantic kingdom. Conscripted into a roving band of mercenaries who storm villages, leaving scorch marks and pillage in their wake, his purpose hardens, "a freezing river of hate." And news that his usurper still lives — now an exile himself, somewhere in Iceland — offers the cosmic chance at retribution he's spent years preparing for. To reach Fjölnir, he'll need to draft himself onto a slave ship with other chattel of war, though he isn't the only one there with no plans to surrender; Taylor-Joy's ferocious, flaxen-haired concubine Olga has, she tells him serenely, her own powers of persuasion beyond the sword.

The Northman is by far Eggers' biggest film in both scope and budget, and it looks it: a sprawling summit-of-the-gods epic shot through with rich, hallucinatory set pieces, and movie stars in wild Pagan wiggery. Skarsgård, deltoids rippling, infers the damaged soul beneath his marauding slaughter-wolf, and a restless volcano lords over them all, burbling witness to the rivers of blood and ritual chaos below. In all that, the script, by Eggers and Icelandic screenwriter Sjón ( Lamb ), serves mostly as bare scaffolding for the film's ravishing vistas and flamboyant violence, neither profound nor particularly important. Beneath the runes and visions, it's a tale as old as Game of Thrones , and as simple as a story told around a campfire: a ride of the Valkyries spelled out in gore and popcorn. Grade: B

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In Praise of The Northman ’s Ruthless Unrelatability

Nicole Kidman plays a Norse queen whose husband is murdered and who ends up married to the murderer, her former brother-in-law. In Hamlet , she’d be Gertrude, but in the The Northman , which takes for its source material the brawnier, grislier legend on which the Shakespeare play is based, she’s named Gudrún, and she’s slung over the shoulder of her still-bloody new spouse Fjölnir (Claes Bang) and carried off as the spoils of fratricide. Watching from a hiding spot, her young son Amleth adds to the murderous to-do list as he flees into the night muttering, “I will avenge you, Father. I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir.” And yet, when he makes his way back to Gudrún as an adult played by a hulking Alexander Skarsgård, Amleth is thrown to discover that his mother appears to be happy with Fjölnir, with whom she’s since had a son. She challenges Amleth’s assumption that it was Fjölnir she needed to be rescued from, showing him the slave brand on her chest and taunting him for believing his parents’ marriage was actually the fairy-tale joining of noble families he’d been told.

Kidman’s a scream in The Northman , and in a revisionist take on its tale, Gudrún would be a tragic feminist anti-heroine trying to engineer a life she wants from her unwilling perch in a society shaped around what she describes as savagery. But in this film, she’s practically demonic in that moment, a degenerate flying in the face of the particular Viking social order Amleth has dedicated himself to restoring. It’s not that her desires are unsympathetic — on the contrary, Gudrún, with her thoughts on good leadership and her desire to choose a caring mate, may be more relatable than any other character in the film. But relatability is the last thing on The Northman ’s mind. The film is the third from writer-director Robert Eggers, who shares a screenplay credit here with the Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón. And like Eggers’s previous work, it’s interested in not just re-creating the details and texture of a past era but also its way of thinking. The Northman is a gloriously ruthless saga involving sorcery, the immutability of fate, sackings and stormy journeys at sea and a nude sword fight in the shadow of a volcano. But its most notable quality is the way it refuses to bend its characters to the present, preferring instead to make them as alien in their perspective as possible. The Northman doesn’t invite its viewers into its world, but instead dares them to try to catch up.

There’s an inevitable distancing effect to this approach, though that’s refreshing into itself. Eggers’s debut feature, The Witch , strove to re-create the world as seen by its Puritan colonists — not just in the minutiae of their desperate efforts to carve survival for themselves out of the unforgiving wilderness, but in their certainty that the Devil was real and present and actively working against them in tangible ways. The Northman may be about the familiar motivation of revenge, but it’s even more remote in its belief system. Amleth’s father, King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), talks about how shameful it would be to grow old instead of dying in battle and ascending to Valhalla. Amleth is named his successor in a ceremony in which he pretends to be a dog, laps up a hallucinogenic potion, and sees a vision of his ancestors’ bodies hanging from a tree. As a grimy grown-up striated with muscles and with shoulders so broad they seem to weigh him down — no one has ever been more born for a role than Skarsgård was for this one — Amleth becomes a berserker, slaughtering his way with unpretty skill through a Rus village, then meandering indifferently through the aftermath of raping and pillaging like a retail worker who’s finally off the clock. When he encounters a seeress played by Björk, one of several witches he meets along the way, she reasonably points out that he’s been terrorizing her people and then reminds him of his avowed mission anyway, as though his fate were simply bigger than the day-to-day lives of the villagers being rounded up to be sold for labor.

“These savages make for fine chattel,” Amleth’s cohort observes in one of the screenplay’s balder moments. Savagery is in the eye of the beholder, and The Northman is fiercely committed to rooting itself in a particular perspective, even when Amleth meets a wily Rus captive, Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), who becomes his ally and his lover. When so much recent media has bent history to accommodate more modern points of view, there’s something spectacular about Eggers’s refusal to soften his protagonist in any way or to have him learn the sort of lessons a 2022 story demands. You don’t need to understand Amleth’s values to invest in his brutal journey, which is filled with heart-pounding set pieces and unabashed badassery — I was partial to the moment he casually catches a spear hurled down at him from the battlements and then tosses it back. The Northman benefits from surrendering to that sense of remove, to its hero’s unforgiving understanding of the universe having been created to reward violence. You wouldn’t want to see him striding up to the walls of your settlement, but hard-core moments like the one in which Amleth disguises himself as a slave are easy to appreciate. He doesn’t just pick up an iron from the fire and use it to brand his own skin; he mutters to the tool that, should he meet its owner, “I will thank him for the warmth you gave to me.” Metal!

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‘The Northman’ Review: Alexander Skarsgård Hacks His Way Through Bloody Viking Epic

'The Witch' director Robert Eggers has vision to burn, but robs this brutal 10th-century revenge story of the tragic twist it needs to hook us emotionally.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Fields glow kryptonite green against volcanic black soil, while not-so-distant mountains smoke and spew hot red lava above the heads of hardy sheep. Nowhere else on Earth looks like Iceland, which is why so many productions over the past decade — from “Interstellar” and “Oblivion” to “Game of Thrones” and “Thor” — have used its peerless primordial terrain to represent alternate dimensions and far-off planets.

Iceland plays itself in Robert Eggers ’ “ The Northman ,” a brutal tale of 10th-century Viking revenge that makes evocative use of far more than just the scenery to be found in this stunning Nordic outpost. Teaming with local novelist Sjón, Eggers — a visionary director with a preternatural interest in history, as evidenced by his rigorously detail-oriented horror movies “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” — also draws from the region’s rich folklore, looking to the sagas of Iceland, as well as the same Scandinavian legend that inspired Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” to mount the classiest Vikesploitation epic you can imagine, complete with a doomsday Björk cameo. That it’s ultimately rather dull and hardly any fun is almost beside the point.

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Blame that largely on Alexander Skarsgård, son of towering European talent Stellan (“Breaking the Waves”). Alexander’s as handsome a star as Sweden has produced, but sorely lacks the charisma to carry a movie of this scale — rumored to have cost $90 million. Though he’s bulked up significantly since his comparably physical turn in 2016’s largely unnecessary “The Legend of Tarzan,” muscles only go so far to compensate for the strange emptiness behind young Skarsgård’s eyes. And so, this scion of art-house royalty has much to prove in a starring role that borrows heavily from “Gladiator” and pretty much every Mel Gibson movie (but mostly “Braveheart”).

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The story is simple — too simple, alas: Puny prince Amleth (played as a boy by Oscar Novak) eagerly welcomes his father, Viking king Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), back from battle, undergoing an initiation ceremony that will set him on course to rule the tribe one day. “You are dogs who wish to become men,” growls the fool (Willem Dafoe), though Amleth’s animal instincts will not reveal themselves until much later. Upon exiting the trippy ritual, father and son are confronted by half-brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang), who relieves the king of his crown, and the head to which it is attached, then orders the same fate for his son, who escapes, repeating the words, “I will avenge you, Father. I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir.”

This mantra is practically all the plot “The Northman” offers, skipping forward across the years that many would find most compelling — when this tender child acquires the skills of strength and mind that make him capable of facing off against his uncle, who has taken Amleth’s mother, Gudrún (Nicole Kidman, blazing with unrivaled fury), as his queen. In most respects, Eggers is a unique artist with strong, singular ideas of how to script, stage and pace his films, and while “The Northman” is nothing if not a signature addition to a most original oeuvre — no one but Eggers would or could have reimagined “Hamlet” thus — it lacks the element of surprise that made “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” feel like instant classics.

Over the course of a portentous 137 minutes, Amleth will dutifully avenge his father, “save” his mother and face off against Fjölnir, but none of it makes even a fraction of the emotional impact we’d expect from even the crassest sword-and-sandal movie. Eggers’ films tend to play on a different, more self-conscious level, where audiences’ pleasure comes as much from atmosphere and all-around weirdness as it does from deranged narratives that, in retrospect, are destined to have played out exactly as they did. If anything, the oddity factor should be greater here than ever, given Eggers’ fetishistic commitment to weaving elements of Norse mythology alongside the punishing Icelandic action. To that end, visions of screaming Valkyries (model Ineta Sliuzaite) and a haggard He-Witch (Ingvar Sigurðsson) pack a hallucinatory punch amid the otherworldly locales.

Still, “The Northman” feels unusually thin, with less meat on its bones than 2007’s schlocky “Pathfinder” or your basic “Conan” movie. Eggers, who formerly let his freak flag fly with A24, has reverted to a more conventional mode for this relatively mainstream Focus Features release, eschewing the elevated language of “The Lighthouse” and avoiding the kind of surrealism seen in David Lowery’s “The Green Knight” last year — a film that should have paved the way for far greater expressionism here. The movie that “The Northman” most resembles is “The Revenant,” an impressively orchestrated marathon of misery that prioritized directorial skill over audience engagement. Eggers’ feat seems similarly monomaniacal in its mission, often at the expense of the human dimension.

After raiding a Slavic village in a spectacular early scene, filmed in what appears to be a single uninterrupted take, Amleth hears the prediction that will snap him out of berserker mode and set him in motion to fulfill his destiny. His rather implausible plan involves branding his chest and sailing to Iceland with a boat full of Slavic slaves, including an almond-eyed beauty with platinum hair named Olga ( Anya Taylor-Joy ).

Olga proves to be both an asset and a distraction to Amleth upon reaching Iceland, suggesting a path his life could take if he were to set aside his fixation on revenge in favor of romance, Óðinn willing. This alternative is made explicit in a scene that seems all wrong for the movie, set aboard a Viking longship, as the actors stand crudely haloed against CG backdrops, suggesting either reshoots (this is only a guess, though it would explain what doesn’t work about the last act of the film) or a grave miscalculation as to what motivates the final, fiery showdown between Amleth and Fjölnir.

There’s a tried-and-true formula for revenge movies, which are tragic by their very nature, that depends on repeated demonstrations of evil by a figure who deserves to be destroyed. That model would require Fjölnir to do something unforgivable to Olga, since she’s the only thing in the world Amleth cares about. Failing that, he comes across as a cruel and merciless protagonist, bent on crushing the life of a man whom fate has already humbled. We still want to see him succeed, battling it out in the buff against the flaming Gates of Hel, but by this point, a film that has shown such painstaking attention to craft over character seems to be running more on testosterone than sensitivity.

Reviewed at Dolby Laboratories screening room, Burbank, Calif., April 5, 2022. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 137 MIN.

• Production: A Focus Features release of a Focus Features, Regency Enterprises presentation, in association with Perfect World Pictures of a New Regency, Square Peg production. Producers: Lars Knudsen, Mark Huffam, Robert Eggers, Alexander Skarsgård, Arnon Milchan. Co-producer: Francesca Cingolani. Executive producers: Yariv Milchan, Michael Schaefer, Sam Hanson, Thomas Benski.
• Crew: Director: Robert Eggers. Screenplay: Sjón, Robert Eggers. Camera: Jarin Blaschke. Editor: Louise Ford. Music: Robin Carolan, Sebastian Gainsborough.
• With: Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Björk, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie. (English, Old Norse dialogue)

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The Northman Review

15 Apr 2022

The Northman

No filmmaker in the last 20 years has done folklore quite like Robert Eggers . The Witch and The Lighthouse showcased his skilful ability to transpose the stories of old into celluloid form, without losing the historical, mystical and cultural veracity of their origin, and both have been weird and wacky gifts to behold. Yet these intimate portraits of North American myth are a whole different ballgame compared to the Viking legend of Eggers’ latest cinematic endeavour. To say he’s stepped it up a notch would be an understatement — the man’s smashed it right out of the park.

In an ambitious exploration of Nordic mythology, various gods are worshipped — anyone familiar with Marvel’s take on the Thor franchise will recognise names such as Odin or Freyja — but this is very much the brutal story of man. One man, in particular: Prince Amleth, a beast of a warrior played with feral intensity by Alexander Skarsgård . He stalks across the screen, shoulders hunched forward and carrying the weight of every kill he’s committed since fleeing his home as a cub after witnessing the murder of his father, King Aurvandil ( Ethan Hawke ), by his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang), in a power move to take over their kingdom in the North. If this tale feels similar to Hamlet , that’s because Eggers and his co-writer, Icelandic poet Sjón, took inspiration from the same 12th-century Danish story as Shakespeare. But the two have expertly interwoven mystical strands of Icelandic fable into five, multilayered chapters of bombastic drama, steeped in so much familial conflict, barbaric romance and bloodthirsty violence that after two-and-a-half hours, your mind, body and soul might just need an ice bath to recover.

Each vignette of action is articulated with such high-octane precision and depth by cinematographer Jarin Blaschke that no performance is wasted. In one sequence, the camera tracks Amleth roaring into action, sprinting at an encampment as spears and arrows whip past his naked body before he launches onto its high, wooden wall, hauls himself over and, with an axe, meets the heads, necks and backs of several opponents. Later, as he prowls through the village and turns out of shot, we witness the unrelentingly cruel violence visited upon defenceless women and children, before he returns to the frame in murderous fashion. Long takes like these, accompanied by composers Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough’s pulsating score, throbbing with drumbeats and low notes, emphasise the savage spectacle and unforgiving harshness of these times, but also the powerful physicality of Skarsgård.

Skarsgård seems possessed with Old Nordic fire, showing both melancholy and a taste for blood.

The Swedish actor has long wanted to play a Viking, and Eggers has created the perfect environment to truly bring out the berserker within. Whether it’s in the natural light against backdrops of forests, mountains, seas and rivers or behind the veil, on the rich, black-and-white plane of gods, dead kings and valkyries, Skarsgård seems possessed with Old Nordic fire, showing both melancholy and a taste for blood. It’s quite unlike anything he’s done before.

In such a wild historical epic, each actor, in fact, brings a willingness to throw themselves into the madness. Anya Taylor-Joy holds her own as white witch Olga of the Birch Forest, a character who is as radiant as she is resourceful, imbued with quiet confidence and emotional rigour. Hawke and Willem Dafoe — as Heimir the Fool — are riotously primeval in an early rite-of-passage scene; Björk’s seeress is pure magic; and Bang brings dignity and believable lethality to his chief antagonist. Nicole Kidman , meanwhile, is positively chaotic as Amleth’s queen mother, with a role that puts her son’s whole worldview into question. That’s the beauty of this story of heroes and villains, good and evil: it’s all about perspective, and Eggers’ vision of the Old World is one that closes in on the fallacies of men who are willing to kill and die for the sake of legacy, honour and tradition. He takes us on a bloody, merciless voyage across land, sea and otherworlds, culminating with a cathartic third-act battle realised in blazing glory. “Til Valhall!”, indeed.

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The Northman

A young Viking prince is on a quest to avenge his father's murder. A young Viking prince is on a quest to avenge his father's murder. A young Viking prince is on a quest to avenge his father's murder.

• Robert Eggers
• Alexander Skarsgård
• Nicole Kidman
• 2.3K User reviews
• 376 Critic reviews
• 82 Metascore
• 6 wins & 65 nominations

Top cast 59

• Queen Gudrún

• Fjölnir the Brotherless

• King Aurvandil War-Raven

• Olga of the Birch Forest

• Thórir the Proud

• Heimir the Fool

• Hallgrímr Half-Troll

• Finnr the Nose-Stub

• Áshildur Hofgythja

• Hersveinn Battle Hard
• Hjalti Battle Hasty

• Young Amleth

• Hallur Freymundur

• The Mound Dweller
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia In the scene in which the Úlfhéðnar attack the Slavic town, Amleth catches a spear in midair and throws it back at the Slavs in one movement. This is taken from the medieval Icelandic story of Njáls saga in which Audolf throws a spear at the Viking hero Gunnar, but Gunnar catches it in midair and throws it straight through Audolf and his shield.
• Goofs The runic inscription of "Amleth's Saga" is written incorrectly in the movie version as opposed to the trailer of The Northman where it is correct. The title shown in the trailer written with runes can be translated to "amluthasaka" or amlóða saga, amleth's saga. However at the end of the actual movie the title is missing the rune of "a" from its word saga, making it read akin to "Amleth's sga".

Young Amleth : I will avenge you, Father! I will save you, Mother! I will kill you, Fjölnir!

• Crazy credits The film title and the intertitles appear in ancient Norse runes.
• Connections Featured in The Critical Drinker: The Northman - We Need More Movies Like This (2022)

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• Will composer Mark Korven reunite with Robert Eggers to compose the score for this Viking epic?
• April 22, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• United Kingdom
• Official Focus Features
• El hombre del norte
• Hekla, Rangárvallasýsla, Iceland
• New Regency Productions
• Universal Pictures
• Focus Features
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $70,000,000 (estimated)
• $34,233,110
• $12,290,800
• Apr 24, 2022
• $69,633,110

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 17 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
• Dolby Surround 7.1
• Dolby Digital

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In Viking epic 'The Northman,' life is nasty, brutish and short-tempered

Glen Weldon

Raider of the lost hearth: Alexander Skarsgård rages for revenge, and his erstwhile homeland, in The Northman . Focus Features hide caption

Raider of the lost hearth: Alexander Skarsgård rages for revenge, and his erstwhile homeland, in The Northman .

"I will avenge you, Father; I will save you, Mother; I will kill you, Fjölnir."

These are the words that young Viking prince Amleth (Oscar Novak, as a boy, Alexander Skarsgård, as a man) mutters to himself repeatedly — a tripartite vow to himself to return to the kingdom from which he fled after his evil uncle, Fjölnir, murdered his father the King and married his mother the Queen.

Something is rotten in the fictional island kingdom of Hrafnsey, in other words. The Northman doesn't so much adopt the plot of Hamlet as dig beneath it to unearth the ur-story that predates Shakespeare by centuries. So while the tale's broad strokes are familiar, its particulars can vary in intriguing ways.

As played with feral, foaming rage by a sinewy Skarsgård, for example, Amleth is no dithering Dane who chooses to procrastinate from the bloody task before him by flouncing around a castle, mumbling existential monologues to himself. No, this guy joins up with a band of berserkers who deck themselves out in wolf-pelt drag and pillage settlements throughout Eastern Europe. Like Hamlet, however, Amleth forgets himself, getting so caught up in his life of murder (and, from the available evidence, in his Crossfit routine) that he gets remonstrated by an otherworldly Seeress (Björk, somehow inevitably) who reminds him of his vow.

There's a ruthless efficiency to Robert Eggers' third feature, which tamps down the director's surreal, experimental sensibility — or at least, cordons it off from the main action and shunts it into the realm of dreams, visions and fevers; it's a surprisingly conventional storytelling choice from such an unconventional director.

The story, co-written by Eggers and the Icelandic poet Sjón, is in fact so straightforward and familiar that you might find yourself, as I did, growing impatient for those moments of the fantastic and otherworldly, for the gods and monsters of Viking culture to insert themselves into the proceedings. Whenever they do, it's thrilling, as Eggers is a deft hand at letting one world bleed into the other.

Nicole Kidman stars as Queen Gudrún, wife of King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) in The Northman Aidan Monaghan/Focus Features hide caption

Nicole Kidman stars as Queen Gudrún, wife of King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) in The Northman

When revenge drives the plot, it can't help but imbue the proceedings with a satisfying pulpiness, which is probably why The Northman , for all its vaunted, assiduous attention to historical accuracy, somehow ends up having so much of Conan the Barbarian and Assassin's Creed Valhalla to it. That's not meant to disparage Eggers' film — both Conan and ACV deliver on their premises. But where, for example, the actors in The Witch spoke period-appropriate Early Modern English dialogue, the characters of The Northman speak English inflected with vaguely Scandinavian consonants ("Neverrr enterrr my bedchamberrrrr without knockinggg-ga!"), which can't help but admit some small amount of cheesiness to the mix.

There are, amid all the starkly beautiful landscapes and the starkly brutal violence, a handful of small, human touches that help keep things emotionally grounded. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Olga, Amleth's ally and love-interest, as someone far more wise about the ways of the heart than he could ever hope to be, which sets up one of the film's nicer twists. Claes Bang gets to shade the evil, usurping Fjölnir with more emotional layers as he ages.

Ultimately , The Northman may have less to say about the nature of violence, and the perverse traps that simplistic notions of masculinity and honor lay for the soul, than last year's similarly evocative medieval meditation The Green Knight. But that David Lowery film set out to be something that audiences grappled with and argued over.

I get the sense that Eggers' goal here is a simpler, more direct one — to interpret a very old story anew, to deliver the narrative goods (betrayal, murder, revenge, redemption) with the help of his largest budget yet, and to let Björk be Björk, in all her sublime Björkiness. In this, The Northman delivers.

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The Northman

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In Theaters

• April 22, 2022
• Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth; Anya Taylor-Joy as Olga of the Birch Forest; Claes Bang as Fjölnir the Brotherless; Ethan Hawke as King Aurvandil War-Raven; Nicole Kidman as Queen Gudrún; Willem Dafoe as Heimir the Fool; Björk as Seeress

Home Release Date

• May 12, 2022
• Robert Eggers

Distributor

• Focus Features

Positive Elements   |   Spiritual Elements   |   Sexual & Romantic Content   |   Violent Content   |   Crude or Profane Language   |   Drug & Alcohol Content   |   Other Noteworthy Elements   | Conclusion

Movie Review

I will avenge my father. I will save my mother. I will kill my uncle.

Amleth whispers those teeth-clenched words over and over as he pulls away from shore, straining with all his remaining strength at the small skiff’s oars. He had seen his father betrayed and riddled with arrows that night.

His father, the king, had been beheaded by his own brother. His kingdom stolen. And then as Amleth ran through the village—hiding and running from building to building to avoid his uncle’s men—he saw his fair mother grabbed and tossed over a strong shoulder like a bag of grain.

But even keen-eyed warriors can’t always catch sight of a small boy hiding in the streets. And so Amleth finds his way to the docks and leaves the vile carnage of the village behind.

It may take time: he’ll need experience at killing, years of hardened muscle and many scars before he’s ready. But someday he will return … to avenge his father, save his mother and kill one hated man.

That is a vow that Odin will not fail to hear.

It is young prince Amleth’s destined and bloody fate.

Positive Elements

Through most of the film, Amleth appears to be nothing more than a heartless man set on some form of savage vengeance. But he is touched by the charms of an earth mystic named Olga. He even exposes himself to great harm to protect her—something he would normally not do.

There is a brief moment when it appears that Amleth’s feelings for Olga might cause him to change direction, perhaps to push against his fate and raise a family. (But fate and Odin’s will win out.)

During a ritual with his father, Amleth swears he will safeguard his family and live in honor. (Though how, exactly, he keeps those vows is left open to a bloody interpretation.)

Spiritual Elements

From the film’s opening moments until the Valkyrie’s flying horse ride to heaven at the movie’s close, The Northman is jam-packed with Norse mythology.

There are numerous references to Norse lore and old Norse gods here. As a coming-of-age ritual, for instance, Amleth and his father walk through a ceremony of devotion to Odin. They crawl around and howl like wolve before a large stone altar and take vows to the gods together. Amleth has a vision of his royal lineage’s “tree of kings”: a large tree littered with skeletons, corpses and living men.

Throughout Amleth’s life, Odin shows up in a variety of forms—as a witch; a shaman; a flock of crows; and as a ghostly, bearded image—to remind Amleth of his unwavering and unavoidable fate.

Indeed, the film declares that mans’ fate is predetermined and set. An individual’s will is a part of life; but a person’s decisions only reallreall matter insofar as they entertains the gods’ fancy and eventually lead to the expected outcome. Whenever Amleth veers even slightly from his path of fate, it results in his pain and injury.

Odin, in shaman form, holds up a man’s desiccated head and that lopped off noggin talks to Amleth and gives him some fate-focused guidance. Amleth also gives battle to a huge, undead Viking in a quest to obtain a deadly blood weapon that can only be drawn at night.

When Amleth first meets Olga, she is known by others as a “spell speaker,” a mystic who communes with the earth gods. We see her chanting spells in a foreign tongue and speaking to those spirits on several occasions. She and Amleth both have visions about the future of their union. In fact, when Amleth first tells her of his quest to kill Fjölnir, his uncle, she tells him: “Your strength breaks men’s bones; I’m coming to break their minds.”

We see others, including Fjölnir, pray to Odin for guidance. When some of Fjölnir’s men are butchered and then hung up in a ritualistic manner, the chieftain wonders if it’s his Christian slaves (foreign captives who are branded with the image of a cross) who have done the horrible deed. One of Fjölnir’s men reasons that it must be the Christians at fault since “their god is a corpse nailed to a tree.”

In response to this murder, Fjölnir has a witch go about the process of sacrificing one of the Christian slaves. However, Amleth upends the killing, setting the female slave free and instead sacrificing the witch and her assistant.

During a funeral for one of Fjölnir’s sons, a horse is beheaded and the blood sprinkled about. And then a female singer is also killed and placed on the same floating skiff that’s used as a funeral pyre for the corpse. Later we see two corpses laid out beside a dead, beheaded horse in a similar makeshift funeral near a hillside.

A screaming Valkyrie in full armor rides up into the heavens with a man’s corpse in tow.

Sexual & Romantic Content

A large group of men and women run naked in the woods during a celebration. We see them embracing and kissing and then having sex on the ground and up against trees. It’s during this sequence that Amleth and Olga slip away to get intimate in the woods as well. We see them writhing naked on the ground together and the camera watches closely as they have sex and then cuddle and talk afterward. (Both are fully naked with key areas strategically covered.) Later we see the pair naked in a hot spring, where her bare backside is completely visible.

A young Amleth runs in to see his mother, catching her as she is just slipping into a cotton shift—exposing her legs and a quick glimpse of her backside. A court jester makes some sexual quips about a man’s arousal. We see men whipping themselves into a savage rage before a battle—all shirtless in either breeches or loincloths.

Amleth learns that his mother sexually betrayed his father with another man. She tells him that the king’s “affection was only for silver and rutting his whores.”

When Fjölnir first sees Olga, he’s taken by her beauty and asks that she be made available for his pleasure. Later, he to pull her aside for sex, but she declares that it’s during her menstrual cycle. Pulling up her skirts, she removes her blood-soaked cloth and shoves it in his face.

Then Amleth’s mother tries to seduce him , caressing and kissing him and promising that he could be her new king. We see Fjölnir naked from the rear while conducting a funeral. And later he and Amleth both battle each other while fully naked. They fight in front of a glowing lake of lava, however, so much of the action is seen in silhouette and only partially lit.

Violent Content

This grim story unleashes viscerally savage and graphically realistic images of death-dealing. We witness an unending stream of that barbarous destruction.

After the film’s opening moments, for instance, Amleth’s father comes back from a months-long Viking raid with slaves in tow and a horrid gash in his abdomen. He unwraps the bloody wound to show his son and sticks the boy’s fingers into its gore. Soon after that, he gets attacked by betrayers from his own clan who hit him with several arrows. As he struggles to fight them off, they drive spears into him and finally behead him.

While on his own, the young Amleth is taken in by another group of Vikings who raise him in the ways of war. These battlers whip themselves into a howling frenzy before combat and then storm forts to butcher every living person there except those suitable for human slavery. Covered head to foot in blood, we see them hack away at men, women and children with raging glee. An adult and hugely muscled Amleth joins them. We see him attack one man and rip the man’s neck open with his teeth, sucking in the flesh and gore before howling like a beast.

Upon setting off on his quest for vengeance, Amleth brands himself with a searing branding iron to pass as a slave. And then, after being accepted into a group of slave laborers, he unleashes a string of terrorist-like attacks on his unsuspecting captors. He kills several night guards, for instance, and then hacks their bodies into pieces to create a grotesque collage of flesh and wooden pikes.

Amleth participates in a hard-hitting, and in some cases, deadly game held by slaves for the amusement of the Viking clansmen. In it, men are pummeled with sticks and bash at each other while trying to score goals. At one point, a young boy runs onto the field and a huge competitor slams the boy to the ground, knocking him unconscious. That bear-like man then moves to strike the boy a deadly blow before Amleth runs in to save him—crushing the man’s skull with repeated blows from his own.

We see many hacked and slashed battlers. Men are stabbed repeatedly. Limbs and heads are lopped off, throats slashed. One wounded man hobbles into a hut before his slashed open entrails spill out onto the floor. Another naked man is hung upside down by his feet, his entrails hanging out and his genitals removed. Amleth kills a young man and then cuts out his heart to keep for future needs.

In addition to all that, Amleth is beaten down when he faces too many foes alone. He’s strung up and tortured. We see him stabbed and slashed repeatedly.

After a raiding party of Vikings takes a town, we see the warriors feasting and passing the village’s attractive women around for implied sexual acts. (The women are battered and weeping but clothed when we see them.)

Crude or Profane Language

There are several uses of the word “b–tard” and a couple references to “H—.”

Drug & Alcohol Content

Men drink with abandon after several different battles and contests. Some getting decidedly inebriated. Olga uses a special mushroom to create a soup with hallucinogenic properties that cause men to fall unconscious and/or see terrible visions, in some cases to the point of stabbing themselves. Amleth and his father lap up bowls of some sort of drug-laced beverage that give them a shared vision.

Other Noteworthy Elements

Amleth and his father pass gas as a part of a ritual. After Amleth fights an undead creature, he beheads it and sticks its face into its own backside.

Men get drunk and vomit. A drugged soup causes several to vomit as well.

The Northman is dark, angry and brutal. Director Robert Eggers’ ambitious take on a fatalistic tale of vengeance and death—”the story of a prince destined for Valhalla”—is how a bloody piece of Norse mythology might look if filmed with a cinematographer’s eye. It feels mercilessly authentic: a grunting, raging, muscle-straining bellow translated to movie form.

Of course, that doesn’t make it entertaining, per se. One shouldn’t go in expecting an interesting or redeeming storyline, or characters that you can care about. Or anything with heart, for that matter. This pic plods and hacks in a predictable and bloody straight line, and its resolution is as inescapable as it proclaims old Norse mystic fate to be.

Put simply, this is a film of heavily muscled men raging, rutting and ravaging while Norse gods pull their puppet strings.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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• Robert Eggers’ <i>The Northman</i> Is a Visually Resplendent Viking Saga

Robert Eggers’ The Northman Is a Visually Resplendent Viking Saga

D ads! Planning a motorcycle trip anytime soon with your sons? Mom staying behind because she has “stuff to do”? Vroom—don’t walk—to the nearest cinema showing Robert Eggers’ The Northman , a visually resplendent Viking saga enfolding revenge, ideals of familial duty, and awesome silver jewelry.

Eggers co-wrote the film with the Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón, with an eye toward capturing old Norse culture as a rich repository of art, poetry, and spiritual beliefs. Other contributions to history include tests of manhood involving farting and belching. The Vikings were complicated people.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

The story opens in the early 10th century in the British Isles, where fresh-faced 10-year-old Prince Amleth (Oscar Novak) is destined to succeed his father King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke). But Aurvandil’s troublemaking brother Fjolnir (Claes Bang) wreaks murderous havoc on that plan, carrying Amleth’s mother Gudrun off like a prize. (She’s played by Nicole Kidman, in a marvelous crimped mane à la Studio 54.) Young Amleth escapes the violence, vowing revenge, and after growing into the beefy form of Alexander Skarsgard, sets out to get it.

He also makes sweet love to saucy enslaved girl Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy), and has a hallucinatory meeting with a blind seer ( Björk ) who urges him not to stray from his mission. Eggers, too, takes his mission seriously, at times fulfilling it with unintentionally comical solemnity. “Your sword is long!” exclaims one of the Viking womenfolk as she gazes upon Amleth’s ancestral iron weapon. Still, there’s always something to look at in this cracked magisterial landscape of moss and mud and angry volcanoes. The Northman, whether you approach it as legitimate folklore or as a testosterone-fueled Saturday-afternoon lark, speaks to the 10-year-old boy in all of us, with a loud and mighty Viking burp.

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The northman.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 3 Reviews
• Kids Say 8 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Powerful, incredibly bloody, vengeance-fueled Viking saga.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Northman is a bloody Viking revenge epic starring Nicole Kidman, Alexander Skarsgård, and Anya Taylor-Joy. It's powerfully and expertly made by director Robert Eggers but has intense, mature violence and sexual situations. Expect gory battle scenes; characters being hit with…

Why Age 16+?

Extremely strong, gory violence. Long, bloody battles, fighting, hitting, bashin

Woman's naked bottom. Several men and women appear to be having sex during a cel

Infrequent use of "bastard," "bitch," "whore," "hell," "swine," "piss."

Characters eat a mushroom stew and go on "bad trips." Social drinking in taverns

Any Positive Content?

Although entire movie is a quest for revenge, the story eventually begins to sho

Driving force comes from White males (no notable non-White characters), but wome

Characters are mainly seeking violence and revenge and ways to usurp power or ga

Violence & Scariness

Extremely strong, gory violence. Long, bloody battles, fighting, hitting, bashing with weapons, head-butts, etc. Many bloody wounds. Fighters slathered in blood. Characters pierced with arrows, stabbed with swords, impaled with axes. A man rips another man's throat open with his teeth. Throat slicing. Severed heads. Bashed-in faces. Person's nose sliced off; mutilated face. Plucked-out eyes. Mutilated corpses hung from wall. Corpses with hearts carved out. Spilled intestines. Child stabbed (off-screen). Character attacked by dog, dog killed. Horse beheaded. Man stabs himself. Corpses hanging from trees. Naked male corpse. People bound in chains; depictions of slavery. Families are forcibly separated, with screaming young children taken from their parents. Woman hog-tied. Women roughly grabbed. Intense, eerie, nightmarish rituals. Scary stuff: witches, ghosts, the undead. Homes on fire. Vomiting. Incest. Rape is mentioned, and a man tries to have forced sex with an enslaved woman. In a group sex scene, it appears that some men might be forcibly grabbing women.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Woman's naked bottom. Several men and women appear to be having sex during a celebration, with kissing, thrusting, caressing of bottoms, obscured nudity in the shadows, partial bottoms and partial breasts seen, etc. Kissing. Suggestion of incest. Brief shot of a woman dressing, with a gown sliding down over her body. Crude, sex-related humor. Sex-related dialogue. Shirtless males. Naked male corpse. Woman lifts dress to reveal that she's menstruating; brief shot of blood. (Content related to sexual violence is in the "Violence" section.)

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters eat a mushroom stew and go on "bad trips." Social drinking in taverns.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Although entire movie is a quest for revenge, the story eventually begins to show revenge's downsides: the violence, hate, and cyclical nature of it.

Diverse Representations

Driving force comes from White males (no notable non-White characters), but women have more power and agency here than women used to in movies like this. Women here make their own choices, exert their own power.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Positive Role Models

Characters are mainly seeking violence and revenge and ways to usurp power or gain control over others. While a lesson is learned, it's too late.

Parents need to know that The Northman is a bloody Viking revenge epic starring Nicole Kidman , Alexander Skarsgård , and Anya Taylor-Joy . It's powerfully and expertly made by director Robert Eggers but has intense, mature violence and sexual situations. Expect gory battle scenes; characters being hit with arrows, swords, and axes; a man ripping another man's throat with his teeth; severed heads, mutilated faces, and mutilated corpses; and the suggested deaths of a child, dog, horse, and more. Families are forcibly separated. Several characters appear to have sex -- and some women appear to be forcibly grabbed -- with thrusting, touching, and partial bare bottoms and breasts seen. A man tries to rape an enslaved woman; she deters him by lifting her dress and showing him her menstrual blood. There are other sexual situations and sex-related dialogue, as well as uses of "bastard," "bitch," "whore," "hell," "swine," and "piss." Characters eat a "magic" mushroom stew and go on "bad trips," and there's social drinking in taverns. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (3)
• Kids say (8)

Based on 3 parent reviews

Definitely not for children or teens

One of the most solid films i have seen in a long time, what's the story.

Loosely inspired by Shakespeare's Hamlet , THE NORTHMAN opens in the year 895, with King Aurvandill War-Raven ( Ethan Hawke ) returning home to his wife, Queen Gudrún ( Nicole Kidman ), and young son, Amleth (Oscar Novak), after a long voyage. The king's brother, Fjölnir ( Claes Bang ), arrives and betrays him, assassinating him in a sneak attack. Amleth sees his mother being kidnapped and flees, vowing revenge. Years later, he has become a fearsome Viking ( Alexander Skarsgård ). When Amleth encounters a witch and learns Fjölnir's location, he disguises himself as an enslaved person and boards a ship for Iceland. He meets a healer named Olga ( Anya Taylor-Joy ) and forms an unexpected bond with her. Forced to labor on a remote farm, Amleth meets another witch and is told the location of a magic sword. With the sword, Amleth begins to carry out his revenge, killing Fjölnir's men one by one. But before he battles Fjölnir himself in a fiery showdown, Amleth must face a terrible truth -- and make an impossible decision.

Is It Any Good?

Director Robert Eggers has created a powerful saga full of passion, rage, and dark fantasy. As with his remarkable debut feature The Witch , Eggers seems to have poured a ton of research into The Northman , as well as teaming with veteran Icelandic writer Sjón ( Lamb ) to capture an eerie authenticity. It feels like being transported back in time, rather than watching actors in costumes. Even though there's actually little going on here outside of a revenge plot, the movie has weight to it, something at stake. It feels like it was created by people who take pride in their craft.

Recalling David Lowery's entrancing The Green Knight , The Northman switches with ease from earthy battle sequences slippery with mud and gore to unreal sequences of witches or Valkyries, all belonging to the same world. Yet as he proved with his previous movie, The Lighthouse , Eggers is equally skilled with actors and characters. The performances here are all impressive, but Kidman in particular can be so ferocious and startling that her work may feel like an actual sting. As for the overarching revenge plot, it does take 137 minutes to march toward the inevitable. But once it gets there, it does so with a surprisingly primal, visual palette, and it also manages to show the act as an exhausting, ever spiraling curse without end.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Northman 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How is sex depicted in the movie? Which moments are problematic? Why? Have values changed since the time of the Vikings?

Why do you think Amleth ultimately chose revenge? Why might it have been extremely difficult for him to choose love and healing instead? Why is it difficult for us to pursue things we haven't been exposed to?

What's the appeal of Viking stories? What can we learn from that time and place?

How are women represented in the movie? Do they have their own agency and power?

Movie Details

• In theaters : April 22, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : May 13, 2022
• Cast : Alexander Skarsgard , Anya Taylor-Joy , Nicole Kidman
• Director : Robert Eggers
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Latino actors
• Studio : Focus Features
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Magic and Fantasy
• Run time : 137 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong bloody violence, some sexual content and nudity
• Last updated : April 1, 2024

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Robert Eggers’ 2022 film The Northman has opened to rave reviews from critics, with the all-star cast, thrilling revenge story, and striking visuals receiving much of the positive praise. As only Robert Eggers’ third feature film , The Northman follows the director’s distinctive style as it tells an action-packed Viking revenge tale with a much larger scope than Eggers is used to. The director manages to put his larger budget, new ensemble cast, and epic historic tale in The Northman to proper use, leaving the majority of critics satisfied.

The Northman  brings back Eggers' collaborator Anya Taylor-Joy, and currently stands slightly below his past two films in terms of critical reviews, but not by much. At press time, The Northman ’s Rotten Tomatoes critics score is certified fresh at 89 percent, with his acclaimed indie movies The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019) both standing with ratings of 90 percent. Competing in its opening weekend with the meta Nicolas Cage comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent , The Northman ’s Rotten Tomatoes score falls shortly behind the former’s 93 percent critics rating.

Related:  Is The Northman A True Blood Prequel? Why People Think It Relates To Eric

With The Northman maintaining the high critical acclaim of Eggers’ previous ventures at its debut, the 2022 movie brings the director into a new scale of filmmaking without losing any of his masterful artistic touches. The film's reviews are largely positive due to the familiarity of the story that Eggers adjusts with his engaging, maddening style, as well as the can’t-look-away visual marvel that he is able to bring to life with a much higher budget. While Eggers’ style is also distinctive and difficult for some to master, the performances of the actors, particularly those by frequent horror actor Alexander Skarsgård and Nicole Kidman, are so engaging that the risk of Eggers’ changing scope pays off. Even if critics find fault in its attempts at thematic wisdom, The Northman ’s reviews remain positive by virtue of its direction, breathtaking visuals, and performances. Here’s what The Northman ’s positive reviews are saying:

RogerEbert.com :

" Instead, this gory Viking tale works when considering its parts, but never really as a whole. The parts, however, are so thrilling, so uniquely calibrated to feverish, determined ends, that they elevate the entire film. Because how can one complain about the "too muchness" of the Valkyries? How can one scoff at the dizzying, unexplainable flights of magic? The Northman makes you happy it exists, even if you’re not totally happy with it. "

" I get the sense that Eggers' goal here is a simpler, more direct one — to interpret a very old story anew, to deliver the narrative goods (betrayal, murder, revenge, redemption) with the help of his largest budget yet, and to let Björk be Björk, in all her sublime Björkiness. In this, The Northman delivers ."

The Guardian :

" The Northman is a horribly violent, nihilistic and chaotic story about the endless cycle of violence, the choice between loving your friends and hating your enemies – which turns out to be no choice at all, and the thread of fate down which masculinity’s delicious toxin drips. It’s entirely outrageous, with some epic visions of the flaring cosmos. I couldn’t look away. "

" The Northman is gory, muddy, hallucinatory — and intensely entertaining. An examination of the way that violence begets violence, and a study of how a life devoted to single-minded hatred and vengeance can lead to uncomfortable truths, this is a movie that lives up to every saga comic books and metal bands ever spun about the brutal conquerors of yore .  Practically every shot in “The Northman” is gorgeous, but Blaschke’s lighting... brings dread and unease into that beauty, matching the intricate but unsettling sound design. "

" The Northman works best when plot momentum is an afterthought, and when it luxuriates in the smoky, shadowy atmosphere created by Eggers and his collaborators. With viciousness relegated to its margins, it often feels neutered and bloodless, but still ends up on the right side of entertaining thanks to its pulsating music and measured performances ."

While critics can't deny the marvels of Eggers' visuals and gripping atmosphere, some weren't as taken by The Northman 's storytelling styles, particularly its false endings, Hollywood-influenced narrative, and dulled emotional stakes. Since Eggers made a name for himself through his unconventional direction and style, the negative reviews for The Northman suggest a disappointment in the movie's more mainstream Hollywood path, with critics longing for the nontraditional cores of the Anya Taylor-Joy-starring  The Witch and the Willem Dafoe-led  The Lighthouse . Here's what some of the negative reviews are saying about The Northman :

" The Northman... lacks the element of surprise that made The Witch and The Lighthouse feel like instant classics. Eggers, who formerly let his freak flag fly with A24, has reverted to a more conventional mode for this relatively mainstream Focus Features release. Eggers’ feat seems... monomaniacal in its mission, often at the expense of the human dimension ."

" Despite all of the strangeness and brutality, The Northman isn't quite strange or brutal enough. Stranded somewhere between an experimental art project and a mainstream Nordic answer to Gladiator, it's certainly tamer than The Lighthouse. It feels compromised, but the great stuff outweighs the not-so-great stuff ."

Seattle Times :

" Unfortunately, Eggers’ third film, “The Northman,” never reaches its moment of flight. Despite efforts from the Valkyries and Odin’s ravens, this Viking action art piece is fettered to the ground by the demands of the studio gods ."

The biggest drawback for critics in regards to The Northman is its lack of unconventional twists and oddities that made Robert Eggers' previous films so gripping. Rather than feeling Eggers has lost his auteur style, the negative reviews for The Northman claim Hollywood studios are to blame, suggesting the executives and test audiences may have forced Eggers to tame his shocking methodology. While The Northman may not entirely live up to the expectations of a typical Robert Eggers movie, it still offers a thrilling ride full of craft and gore.

Next:  Why The Northman Will Be Bigger Than The Lighthouse (And The Witch)

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The Northman Review: A Ferocious Viking Epic

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Speak No Evil Review: McAvoy Show-Stops but Speak About the Danish Original Instead

Rebel ridge review: this is how you f*cking do it, first reviews praise new 'best ever' stephen king adaptation starring tom hiddleston.

Alexander Skarsgård cuts a swath of bloody vengeance in a ferocious Viking epic. The Northman vividly combines a Hamlet-esque narrative with Scandinavian history and mythology. The film inserts fantasy elements into its brutal depiction of murder, looting, and pillaging. The Norse gods are invoked and bestow favor on a mighty protagonist. His savage odyssey is an action juggernaut of hacked limbs and torn entrails. The Northman is well-acted, directed, and undeniably thrilling ; but suffers from rote predictability through a long runtime.

In the late 9th century, young Prince Amleth (Oscar Novak) eagerly awaits his father's return from battle. King Aurvandill War-Raven's (Ethan Hawke) ships arrive with chests of looted treasure and chained slaves. Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman) warmly greets her conquering husband. His bastard brother, Fjölnir the Brotherless (Claes Bang), curses the Fool (Willem Dafoe) who mocks their triumph. But the King is in good humor with a sacred duty.

Aurvandill decides it is time for his beloved son's rite of passage as a man. The ceremony is cut short by treachery. Fjölnir uses the distraction to attack his brother, usurp the throne, and steal his beautiful wife. Fjölnir's deceitful lackey lies about killing Amleth. Years later, a grown Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) attacks a Slavic village with a gang of raiders. He overhears that Fjölnir has fled to Iceland. Amleth disguises himself with the slaves being sold to Fjölnir. A captured witch, the blonde Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy), recognizes Amleth as an interloper.

Alexander Skarsgård is a beast and a half here. His ultra-chiseled physique mercilessly decimates enemies by any means. Amleth even bites like an animal. He is bitterly consumed by hatred for his uncle. Biding his time for the right opportunity to strike. Amleth's duplicitous turn as a slave offers a stark contrast to the feral warrior. He's beaten, mocked, and goaded by Fjölnir's foolish men. Arrogance blinds them to the dangerous threat in their midst. These scenes further stoke Amleth's rage for the reckoning to come.

Supporting Cast in The Northman

The female supporting cast offers needed character complexity and a welcome diversion from the raging machismo. Women exist to serve the whims of men. Nicole Kidman's Queen Gudrún is more than a concubine passed between brothers. She has the most interesting perspective. Slave women are worked like horses and could be violated at any time. Anya Taylor-Joy's Olga knows she is the most physically attractive slave. She uses her wits to keep defilers at bay. Her cunning becomes a valuable weapon alongside Amleth's brute strength.

Director/co-writer Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse) continues to excel in creating engrossing environments. You can almost smell the dirt, blood, and brisk sea air. Eggers' experience as a production designer allows him to be truly immersive. He creates authentic settings that show the primal nature of the characters. Scenes of the Vikings covered in hides and channeling their bear spirits are magnificent. There is no humanity in their lust for violence and carnal pleasures.

Related: Dual Review: A Clever Premise Runs Out of Steam

The Northman is told in sections of Norse folklore. Amleth's quest is fated by the gods. The film incorporates his visions as cut-scenes from the primary narrative. Amleth sees his family lineage as a luminous tree ascending to the heavens. He also prays to Odin for the will to overcome his suffering. Robert Eggers juxtaposes the grit of battle and servitude with religious imagery. The changes in lighting, surface texture, and depth are superbly done.

The Northman is a spectacularly graphic film . Robert Eggers revels in butchery. The realistic swordplay leaves little to the imagination. Open wounds spurt blood. Skulls are smashed to brain pulp. Heads literally roll. This is not an endeavor for children or anyone remotely squeamish.

Audiences will certainly get their action fix. The Northman gets high marks for looks. I just wish the screenplay was more sophisticated. We've seen the unstoppable killing spree countless times. There's no deviation from the expected.

The Northman is a production of Regency Enterprises and Perfect World Pictures. It will have an April 22nd theatrical release from Focus Features.

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The Front Room Review: Annoying Beyond Comprehension

By Jonathan Sim

A24 has built quite a reputation for its fantastic horror movies. This studio brought us movies like Hereditary, Climax, and The VVitch. The latter was directed by Robert Eggers, who has created other excellent films like The Lighthouse and The Northman, and he has an upcoming Nosferatu movie. Why do I bring up Robert Eggers? Did he direct this movie? No, his two brothers, Mark and Sam, made this movie. They had much to live up to, and I can’t say they did. The Front Room is one of the most dreadfully annoying movies I’ve seen in my entire life.

It pains me to write any of this because, contrary to popular belief, I don’t always enjoy writing negative reviews. Filmmakers pour their blood, sweat, and tears into making movies they hope audiences will enjoy. A horror comedy movie like The Front Room is designed to be that fun, crowd-pleaser horror film that haunts and entertains you simultaneously. The tone is admirable, but I can’t recommend this movie in the slightest because it does not make you laugh, nor does it scare you. The sole effect this movie will have on you is pure irritation.

From the start, the dialogue feels off. The pacing and content of each dialogue scene feel specifically designed to have as little impact as possible. None of it is funny or dramatic; it’s all just bland. The film doesn’t do a terrible job of setting up the characters. We learn that our main couple once had a child who died, and now Belinda, played by Brandy, is pregnant again. But after her husband’s father dies, they must take in his mother, Solange, played by Kathryn Hunter.

The Front Room is playing into the satire of how horrible our mothers-in-law can be. This script wants us to imagine being in this situation and how nightmarish that would be. But the film is at the mercy of its characters, some of the most unlikable people you can spend a blessedly brief 95 minutes with. Firstly, the couple, Belinda and Norman (Andrew Burnap), has no chemistry whatsoever. I’m tired of seeing couples on screen where I have no idea why I should buy into them and their relationship. They feel less like a couple and more like co-workers paid to exist in the same space.

Their performances are not terrible. Brandy’s performance is nothing special despite the script’s constant attempts to get us to root for her. Norman is a dull character. He has an endless amount of work to do, leaves his pregnant wife alone to take care of his mother, and has a traumatic relationship with his mother. The tension between Norman and Solange should have gone somewhere profound and heartbreaking, but nothing comes out of it.

Hunter is the one who’s going the most over-the-top in her role. She seems to be having fun with this wicked elderly lady nobody in their right mind wants to spend time with. But that’s the issue here. She’s very good at being annoying. She’s incessantly whining and doing terrible things. It gets to a point where she is so hard to watch and listen to that I wanted to cover my ears. Props to Hunter for fully committing to the role, but with the rising costs of movie tickets, I struggle to understand why anyone would buy a ticket to this movie so they can subsequently be annoyed for an hour and a half.

You will not laugh at The Front Room because the comedy is unfunny. You will not feel scared for a second because there isn’t anything remotely terrifying in the film. There is not an ounce of suspense. It remains at one long, constant note for the entire movie. It has nothing interesting to say. The film even tries to deal with the idea of racism because we have this interracial couple, causing friction with the conservative mother-in-law. This idea is tackled with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and it feels like the most reductive view of racism. Everything is explored explicitly without any nuance or freedom from the annoyance you feel as you roll your eyes at the dialogue.

Halfway through the film, I finally remembered the genre was supposed to be horror. The Front Room has zero atmosphere, and most of it is spent inside this house. It feels like the type of movie made for very little money. There’s even a very low-quality establishing shot early in the film that looks like it was exported incorrectly. The Eggers brothers often get playful with their framing, using a lot of reflections to create impossible shots. But I can’t vouch for a movie that feels designed to grate on your very last nerve. The ending is ludicrously anticlimactic, and just when you’re hoping for the bittersweet release of the credits rolling, it keeps going and going.

SCORE : 1/10

As ComingSoon’s  review policy  explains, a score of 1 equates to “Awful.”

ComingSoon doesn’t enjoy giving out an awful rating, and it’s generally reserved for video games that are broken or entertainment that is devoid of any redeeming qualities.

Jonathan Sim is a film critic and filmmaker born and raised in New York City. He has met/interviewed some of the leading figures in Hollywood, including Christopher Nolan, Zendaya, Liam Neeson, and Denis Villeneueve. He also works as a screenwriter, director, and producer on independent short films.

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"The Northman": So unglaublich schwierig war der Dreh des Films | Interview

" The Northman " von Robert Eggers beeindruckt nicht nur mit einem Star-Ensemble, sondern vielleicht mit der akkuratesten und bildgewaltigsten Inszenierung von Wikinger-Geschichte. Wir konnten zur großen Deutschland-Premiere ausführlich mit dem Regisseur über "The Northman" sprechen.

Hätte jemand Robert Eggers nach seinem Debütfilm " The Witch " erzählt, dass er einmal einen Wikinger-Film mit einem Star-Ensemble und einem Blockbuster-Budget inszenieren würde, hätte der 38-Jährige vermutlich nur kopfschüttelnd abgewunken: Tatsächlich stand Wikinger-Geschichte und Wikinger-Kultur so gar nicht auf dem filmischen Speiseplan des Ausnahme-Regisseurs – bis es zu einer schicksalshaften Lunch-Verabredung mit "The Northman"-Hauptdarsteller Alexander Skarsgård kam.

Was folgte, ist wohl eine der akkuratesten und epischsten Wikinger-Verfilmungen aller Zeiten, die den Beteiligten wirklich alles abverlangte. Von Covid-Verschiebungsproblemen, kurzfristigen Location-Wechseln bis hin zu One-Take-Aufnahmen, die fast 30 Mal bis zur Perfektion minutenlang durchexerziert werden mussten – " The Northman " ist in jeder Hinsicht ein Passionsprojekt.

Wie hart, aufwendig und schwierig der Dreh zum Wikinger-Epos wirklich war, verriet uns Regisseur Robert Eggers im Interview zur großen Deutschlandpremiere von "The Northman" in Hamburg. Warum der perfektionistische Filmemacher nach seinen beiden Ausnahmefilmen „The Witch“ und „The Lighthouse“ hier tatsächlich immer wieder an seine Grenzen kam, welche Probleme im Zuge der Covid-19-Pandemie entstanden und was ihn an der nordischen Mythologie wirklich gereizt hat, verriet uns Robert Eggers im ausführlichen Gespräch mit TV Movie Online. Das Gespräch seht ihr hier:

"The Northman" feiert am 09. September um 22:15 beim ZDF seine große Free-TV-Premiere!

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'William Tell' Review: This Historical Epic Wants To Be 'Braveheart' So, So Bad | TIFF 2024

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Between historical films like Braveheart , Rob Roy , and Outlaw King that weave legend into blockbuster theatrics, there’s always something exciting about these powerful tales of heroism . As this intense, gritty genre has long captured our imagination through rebellion and timeless struggles, studios are digging into more historical events for big-screen attractions. Making its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last week, BAFTA-winning filmmaker Nick Hamm 's latest brings the legend of a well-known Swiss folk hero to theaters with the adaptation of William Tell . Shining as an epic that delivers visual splendors and powerhouse performances led by Claes Bang , Connor Swindells , and Rafe Spall , the film excels in its breathtaking landscapes and gritty battle sequences but struggles to find its tonal consistency.

Shot on location in Italy with South Tyrol serving as the backdrop of 14th-century Switzerland’s more somber events, William Tell creates a vividness for the audience that is genuinely interesting and engaging . But through its stunning visuals and strong performances, there is a disconnect in the emotional impact that audiences need to create a strong resonance. While the film is a noteworthy addition to the genre and plays alongside some of the ‘90s best epics , it often veers into sweeping drama and action-packed spectacle without firmly defining itself across its 133 minutes. Not to mention, it employs an overused plot device that feels superficial and falls short of its core story.

What Is 'William Tell' About?

In case you don’t remember the tale or the overture to the famed opera, William Tell opens up with a reminder that finds the titular hero (Bang) forced to shoot an apple off his son’s head from a distance. The moment is as tense and nerve-wracking as you would imagine , instantly hooking the audience and their sweaty palms into the story through the curiosity of how things got to this point. Backtracking three days with Europe on the brink of war and the Swiss people having a rough time, an evil, eye-patch-wearing Austrian king, Albrecht ( Sir Ben Kingsley ), and his tax-collecting bullies are making life a living hell for everyone and harassing communities.

Gritty and unforgiving, the story gets started after a shocking act of violence finds a villager immediately seeking revenge after his wife is assaulted and murdered. Though the brutal start sets the film’s tone for some bone-crunching action and a bunch of men (and two leading women) saving the day, it’s this commodification of assault that feels a bit shiftless. There are embellishments in the film for cinematic appeal when you acknowledge its lore, so the assault could have been avoided on paper as it is a tireless plot device that underscores the white male savior culture.

The 10 Most Underrated Historical Movies, Ranked

These underrated historical gems have been lost to time and need to be unearthed.

That said, the film makes its mark after the villager crosses paths with William , who just wants a quiet life after fighting with the Knights Templar during the Crusades . But peace is not that simple for him. With the locals fed up and the abuse of power all around, the weary marksman rises to the occasion. Picking up his crossbow, he prepares to lead the charge against the oppressive Hapsburgs and goes toe-to-toe with the king’s henchman, the loathsome Viceroy Gessler (Swindells). Along the way, William gets the help of his friends and former army men to help, including fellow Crusader Stauffacher (Spall).

While it appears like a band of merry men seeking justice, things get a lot more intense. Moreover, the film does what other epics haven’t really done in the past, which is delving into the folk hero’s PTSD . Filled with some heavy emotional drama, gruesome fight scenes, and hand-to-hand combat sequences that rival the best of the genre, William Tell marries some of our favorites from the ’90s for a revenge-driven story that highlights the cost of war, its toll on our mental welfare and hints at a larger story beyond the hero — one that might even conjure up another chapter, should Hamm undertake the project.

'William Tell' Aims High With Its Strong Performances

While the film doesn’t shy away from showcasing the brutal realities of a rebellion against an oppressive regime, William Tell blends moments of quiet suspense with high-stakes action and performances that highlight the exhaustion of war . This is best seen in William, who grapples with being a reluctant hero and a father as he manages his trauma from the Crusades. Bang, who is best known for his role in the Palme d’Or-winning film The Square and Robert Egger’s The Northman , delivers a powerful and absorbing performance of the folk hero. Bringing a subtle depth and authenticity to the character, Bang’s portrayal of William is nuanced through emphatic expressions and a brooding intensity that stresses his character’s emotional and psychological scars.

With choreographed fight scenes that make it clear William Tell is a formidable warrior, Bang embodies that resilience through a commanding presence that makes him exciting to watch on screen. His chemistry with his co-stars is multifaceted and enriches the tale , especially the interactions he shares with Golshifteh Farahani , who plays William’s wife. Farahani’s character might highlight William’s softer, more vulnerable side, but it’s this duality that creates a sharp and nourishing dynamic for the film.

In supporting roles that add hard-hitting dynamism to the film’s direction is Spall as William Tell’s friend Stauffacher and the villainous and perfectly hated Swindells as Gessler, the king’s right-hand man. While Spall is always a joy to watch and adds a sharp, energetic performance to William Tell , the actor remains one of our generation’s best and most underrated performers. He is consistently frank in his performances to create a strong, memorable value to the story. Alongside that gripping appeal is Swindells, who manages to be a snide, loathsome villain that adds a focused vigor to the cast. Best known for Sex Education and Barbie , Swindells takes this role for a complete spin, eating up every scene he’s in. That unrestrained intensity eventually raises the stakes of Gessler’s confrontation with William, giving us one of the most fierce scenes in the film .

'William Tell' Suffers From Inconsistencies Between Character and Story

But while the film excels with its core cast, it also underutilizes its supporting talent, including the characters in the secondary plot that involves the king’s niece ( Ellie Bamber ) and a Swiss nobleman ( Jonah Hauer-King ). It’s this aspect that highlights some of the film’s inconsistent tones. The two feel rather out of place despite doing their best with the written material and honoring their characters, who eventually join the central group. But it’s stale and lacks strong narrative relevance, making their scenes rather exhaustive and the type that could easily be cut out to lessen the runtime.

Kingsley as the cold, calculating Austrian king, is at times scary, but there doesn’t appear to be much here to loathe him. He has bailiffs doing his dirty work and has an eye patch that veers too far into villainous trope culture. While his character is driven by ego, the Gandhi actor brings enough credibility to fill in the gaps of the role . But this trope feels predictable and overused, lacking any originality that doesn’t exactly contribute to the overall story.

Despite William Tell ’s grand setting and lush cinematography that at times feels painterly, the film struggles to maintain its balance. Between grand melodrama and action sequences that rival Braveheart or even The Last of the Mohicans , the film wants to embrace a more over-the-top campiness but devolves into an earnest realm that somewhat weakens its impact. That said, it’s still an epic feature that scratches the historical itch audiences might have with grand battles, menacing villains, and sweeping vistas that evoke the grit and glory of its cinematic predecessors. Offering a fresh take on a legendary folk hero, William Tell ’s solid cast and engaging battle sequences will keep viewers hooked. Easy to overlook its faults with impressive sequences, performances and sharp cinematography, the film is an appreciated one for its throwback feel. And it might just hit the mark if you’re craving a cinematic apple and arrow experience.

William Tell

• Claes Bang delivers a powerful portrayal of William Tell, supported by dynamic performances from Rafe Spall and Connor Swindells.
• The intense, gritty action scenes, including hand-to-hand combat, rival some of the best in the genre.
• William Tell's breathtaking landscapes, shot in Italy's South Tyrol, vividly recreate 14th-century Switzerland, offering a rich, painterly visual experience.
• The film employs a tired plot device, which feels superficial and overused.
• Key secondary characters, including the king's niece and a Swiss nobleman, feel out of place and fail to add much narrative relevance, leading to pacing issues.

William Tell had its World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

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