Stream It Or Skip It: 'The Northman' on VOD, A Lunatic Viking Saga That's Rich With Gruesome Violence and Spiritual Madness

Raise your alehorn and sword for mighty Robert Eggers, a true visionary, for he is the helmsman of The Northman (now on VOD), The Lighthouse and The Witch (or The VVitch if you please), a most awesomely unholy celluloid triumvirate. His latest is a Viking revenge saga promising enough barbarity and attention to authentic period minutiae to render one slackjaw with awe. Alexander Skarsgard and his pitiless trapezius muscles take center screen as a berserker questing to slake his thirst for vengeance, and his journey brings him in contact with fellow medieval nutjobs played by Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe and, lured back into film by forces surely beyond our comprehension, the sovereign goddess Bjork. I’m under the impression that if one doesn’t watch The Northman one risks being slaughtered for one’s great weakness, so here goes.

The Gist: The Northman opens as every movie should, with a direful prayer to a volcano. It’s A.D. 895, a time apparently void of rational thought. Odin has brought King Aurvandill War-Raven (Hawke) home from battle to his wife Queen Gudrun (Kidman) and tween son Amleth (Oscar Novak). Aurvandill hugs the living shit out of his boy; it’s a man’s man’s man’s man’s man’s world. His subjects pose in firelight as if they exist in ancient paintings. He eyes his plunder. Chained female slaves parade solemnly nearby. Gudrun suggests they head to the bedchamber, but there’s no time for that – Aurvandill sports a torso gash that nearly rendered him paté for vultures. It’s time to initiate his successor to the Tree of Kings, which requires him to bring Amleth to Heimir the Fool and Also the Mystical Dealer of Scandinavian Psychedelics, who will have them bark and howl and run about on all fours like wolves and lap up the drugs and belch and fart and levitate in front of surreal visions and take a pledge of vengeance when fathers are killed in glory in battle and now Amleth is a man.

Amleth has barely coming-of-age’d when Aurvandill is betray’d by his own brother. The boy watches as Fjolnir (Claes Bang) commits regicide and sends his men to commit nepoticide, but when Amleth escapes, he vows to commit avunculicide because one doesn’t take a stoned lupine-oath without being fully dedicated to it. YEARS LATER. Amleth is now played by Skarsgard and has oarboated his traps unto godliness. All the better to help one achieve fireside reverie in praise of battle, and then run fearlessly into such, putting an ax into lesser men until their blood runs down one’s chiseled f—ing delts, lats and abs – and one red droplet down his cheek like a tear. It’s a living. He visits the Temple of Bjork and she reminds him of his oath, and then a RAVEN alights and LOOKS him in THE EYE. He quits the Viking gig and cuts off his hair and brands himself like a slave and passes himself as such on a boat headed to Fjolnir’s sheep farm in Iceland. Fjolnir is no longer king but that doesn’t mean he deserves to still have his head attached to his body. That’s just logic.

Over stormy seas the slavers doth sail, and Amleth meets fellow prisoner Olga of the Birch Forest (Taylor-Joy), who utters spells in foreign tongues. He shares his story and they do what everyone does on first dates in romantic comedies, they vow to help each other kill people. He can break men’s bones, she says, “but I have the cunning to break their minds.” This is love if I’ve ever seen it. They’re assimilated into Fjolnir’s enslavement ranks. Amleth looks up and sees his mother shooing ravens from her window. She is now Fjolnir’s wife and they have a young son and he has another son from a previous relationship who’s a sad, sorry weakling. Fate tugs at Amleth: He follows the fox to get to the He-witch, he consults the He-witch to get the rope, he uses the rope to get to the zombie, he vanquishes the zombie to get the sword and he’ll use the sword to get his revenge, which wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside him – but to what end?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Northman is sort of Mel Gibson’s The Green Knight. It recalls Apocalypto, The Passion of the Christ and Braveheart in its gruesome old-world bloodletting, and shares kinship with the likes of Gladiator and 300.

Performance Worth Watching: Kidman acts up a storm in a key scene that cracks this plot wide open, and proves that sanity is a seed that finds no purchase in this world.

Memorable Dialogue: I’m pretty sure Amleth’s mantra, “I will avenge you Father, I will save you Mother, I will kill you Fjolnir” is the “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die” for a new generation.

I also feel Fjolnir’s pain when he declares, “This is not the work of my god. This is truly sorcery!” because I say the exact same thing when the Detroit Lions lose.

Sex and Skin: Vaguely shadowy frontal nudeness by fire- and lava-light; exposed hindquarters when Amleth and Olga make love on the forest floor within a shaft of moonlight, surely dirty-talking about slaying thine enemies and such.

Our Take: The Northman is lunacy delivered with dead sincerity, and you’ll either roll your eyes and be repulsed, or leap headlong into the flaming crazy and revel in it. The latter reaction is far more tempting for those of us familiar with Eggers’ immersive, unapologetically weird, unsettling visual style, rife with long, virtuoso shots; his occultic-spiritual nightmare stories; and his insistence upon authenticity, which borders on obsessive and dares us to find an anachronism. This Viking tale – co-written by Eggers and Icelandic poet-artist Sjon, and derived from the Saxo Grammaticus-penned legend that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet – is one damn thing after another, rotating among scenes of grotesque violence, whispered declarations and pagan rituals ranging from randy courtship dances to human sacrifice, because in this culture, putting people into this world is just as maniacally fun as taking them out of it.

So what we have here is a revenge picture enriched by eye-widening things: surreal iconography, liturgical deliria, soothsayer Bjork, an old desiccated severed head whose incredibly distinctive bone structure is clearly that of Willem Dafoe – things we haven’t seen before. And that experience is such a rarity, something to be treasured. Eggers looks upon the not-tortured-enough morality of this strange world with an unjudging eye; it’s a kill-or-be-enslaved existence ruled by the most putridly toxic masculinity, the type that inspires a man to utter I WILL BECOME A HAILSTORM OF IRON AND STEEL as he plots to torture those who committed the gravest of betrayals against him.

Discomfort may very well be Eggers’ intent, whether it’s the perverted joy we don’t want to admit we feel when Amleth, schooled in the cruel domination of those weaker than him, inflicts violence upon his foes; or the whiplash guilt we experience when we realize how not fun it would be to watch a movie about a Viking learning to turn the other cheek. This is, after all, not a Christian society – “Their god is a corpse nailed to a tree!” declares a Viking man known as Finnr The Nose-Stub, because his proboscis was sliced off and left for the squirrels. The Northman is perhaps a statement on the folly of revenge and, for that matter, that of fate itself, since the people of ca. 1000 A.D. likely could not fathom the concept of free will. Eggers’ more pointed goal may be simply to adhere unyieldingly and unapologetically to that worldview, so deranged, strange and fascinating to our modern eyes.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Northman marries the battle epic with the chimerical vision of a director who’s one of the best in today’s game. It’s weird and it’s wondrous.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.