Direction: Robert Eggers
Country: USA
After the excellent results obtained with The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019), American director Robert Eggers is abandoning the horror genre that allowed him to make a name for himself. His new film, The Northman, is an unengaging, mythologically charged story of revenge that takes place in 10th-century Iceland. Actors Willem Dafoe, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Kate Dickie team up again with the director but with minor roles, while the heavyweights Alexander Skarsgard, Nicole Kidman, and Ethan Hawke join him for the first time in this exhausting, Hamlet-(un)inspired epic in need of a better dramaturgical arc.
Eggers, who co-wrote the script with Sjón, takes us to the kingdom of King Aurvandil (Hawke), who is betrayed and slayed by his half-brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang). The king’s only son and heir to the throne, Prince Amleth (played as an adult by Skarsgard), manages to escape, swearing revenge. He returns many years after, in the company of an enslaved sorcerer named Olga (Taylor-Joy), to finally avenge his father’s death and free his mother, Queen Gudrún (Kidman).
Denoting a certain grim integrity, the film has its visual beauty exceeded only by the gruesomeness of the violence. As for the rest, there’s a scarce amount of cleverness here. The adrenaline refuses to pump, even when multiple screams of rage burst from the Viking’s mouth, and the execution didn’t satisfy, with Eggers often showing indecision between pure rawness and the frivolous adornment that typically mark high-budget flicks. By comparison, David Lowery’s The Green Knight (2021) was as darkly medieval as this one, but brought much more mysticism and ambiguity to the setting. The Northman has a limited payoff after two hours, and not even an unexpected finale saves it from averageness.
