The Northman Review
By the time Amleth reaches that volcano, you won't be sitting in a theater. You'll be sitting around a campfire in 895 AD, listening to a skald sing a song of blood and iron.
(Imagine a moody, fire-lit shot of Alexander Skarsgård covered in mud, holding a sword.)
Have you seen The Northman ? Did you think it was a masterpiece or an over-indulgent mess? Let me know in the comments below. Just don’t mention the horned helmets. The Northman
The violence is... biblical. Swords don't cling . They squelch . Axes don't slash; they disembowel. There is a sequence near the end involving a volcano, a pile of skulls, and two naked, mud-covered men that is so primal it feels like you’re watching a cave painting come to life.
If you hated the slow-burn ambiguity of The Lighthouse , run away. If you thought Braveheart was too polite, buy a ticket. By the time Amleth reaches that volcano, you
The Northman is none of those things.
Let’s be honest: When you hear “Viking movie,” your brain probably goes straight to horned helmets, cheesy accents, and Kirk Douglas singing in a 1958 Technicolor epic. Or, more recently, the hyper-stylized, political drama of Vikings on the History Channel. Did you think it was a masterpiece or an over-indulgent mess
Wrong. Because Amleth doesn’t just grow up to be a warrior. He grows up to become a wolf—literally and spiritually. He is not a hero. He is a vessel for vengeance. When we see him as an adult, ripping throats out in a Slavic slave raid, he isn't human anymore. He’s an instrument of fate.
Robert Eggers, the madman who brought us the suffocating dread of The Witch and the hallucinatory madness of The Lighthouse , has done the unthinkable. He has taken a $90 million budget, a cast full of A-listers, and a story as old as time (literally Hamlet , which borrowed from the same Norse legend), and turned it into a brutal, psychedelic, howling-at-the-moon revenge saga.
Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) watches his father, King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke), get butchered by his uncle, Fjölnir (Claes Bang). He flees, vowing to avenge his father, save his mother (Nicole Kidman), and kill his uncle. Standard stuff, right?
