Movie Review : The Northman (2022)
The trajectory of young, talented filmmakers in Hollywood usually goes like this : 1) they make a fun and original movie on a shoestring budget 2) they get hired by a studio to direct Batman or whatever because they figure they'll be thankful for the opportunity and do their bidding 3) Disappear into a studio system until they get enough clout to make their own big budget projects or disappear altogether. It is not the trajectory Robert Eggers has chosen. He giddily skipped step 2 and pitched a crazy-ass project to Universal.
Because The Northman is both his craziest and most normal film to date. It’s exactly the type of film studios don’t spend money on in 2022, but they did and it’s great.
The Northman tells the very familiar story of a young prince named Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard) who runs away across the sea after watching his father’s murder at the hand of his own brother (Claes Bang). He comes back years later with plans of killing his uncle and saving his mother (hilariously played by Nicole Kidman) and die in battle, but his plans get derailed by a sexy young slavic woman (Anya Taylor-Joy). If this sounds almost beat-for-beat like the Shakespeare play, it’s because it is. Well, it ALMOST is.
The Excellence of Execution
So, The Northman isn’t exactly a retelling of Shakespeare's iconic play. It's a retelling of Saxo Grammaticus' The Legend of Amleth, which INSPIRED Shakespeare's iconic play. It's really a story you've heard over and over again. It's been adapted under different forms for over four hundred years. Sons of Anarchy has been the latest freewheeling adaptation of this seminal story. When you’re dealing with such an unoriginal narrative, the important is to delivery in a fresh and innovation way and The Northman does it.
The Northman isn’t extremely creative, but it delivers in a unique and powerful way. First of all its prince is not exactly a prince, but a runaway berzerker with a thirst for blood and revenge. Alexander Skarsgard's Amleth also has a connection with the spirit realm that often bleeds into reality. Robert Eggers' supremely beautiful night scenes are a testimony to it: drained out of contrast, they’re almost black and white, but not quite. They both are and feel otherworldly because night is where the spirits come out.
In these night scenes, the craziest fucking shit happens. My favorite is when Amleth calls for every domesticated dog to attack their owners in his uncle's village. It is established early in the movie that he and his father have a supernatural relationship to dogs, so it feels both fresh and terrifying to see it weaponized for a vengeance buried so deep that it seems almost theoretical. Night is where paradigms shift and destinies are changed and Robert Eggers makes great use of it. Whenever night falls, all hell breaks loose.
Eggers created a visual, non-narrative paradigm to build anticipation on a visceral level, not unlike the switch of realms in the Silent Hill video games. It doesn't even feel like a gimmick because the further you get into The Northman, the more the two realms collapse together. It’s the type of wild visual stuff you pay to see Robert Eggers come up with and this natural/supernatural dynamic might just be his most creative yet. It keeps the narrative unpredictable even if you know where it’s ultimately headed.
The Burden of Vengeance
One thing that The Northman does well (which I think MIGHT’VE been unintentional) is both the romanticizing and the deromanticizing of vengeance. Eggers wholeheartedly pictures vengeance to be a self-destructing entreprise. In his journey to kill his uncle, Amleth meets a young slavic woman who casts the reflection of a better life for him. An existence of growing old and raising children. But Amleth turns down the opportunity to be happy for the opportunity to complete an obsessive task.
I thought that was interesting. Amleth remains the master of his own fate until the end, but also self-sabotages it along the way. He prefers to live - I don't know - 40 badass years instead of 70 happy ones? A movie with such dedication for feeling historical like The Northman speaks to how trauma was addressed in immemorial times. This obsession with righting the wrongs was both of product of its time and a self-defeating entreprise that thinned out the gene pool. It seems both understandable and fucking bleak in hindsight.
*
So, is The Northman any good? It's visually great and groundbreaking, but it feels one notch below The VVitch and The Lighthouse in terms of storytelling. It felt like an excuse for a big action movie, but one that was delivered with gusto. It made for a fine evening of entertainment, but I would only rewatch it in very particular circumstances. It’s one of these movies where your aesthetic appreciation for bare chested barbarians counts for a lot and I’ve never had the greatest patience for the genre myself.
