With The Northman, director and co-writer Robert Eggers delivers might best be described as “Death Wish with Vikings,” and this bloody, captivating, big-budget feature is every bit as satisfying as that sounds.
The year is 895 A.D., and King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke) returns to his Irish kingdom from a successful battle. Here he embraces his wife, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), and young heir Prince Amleth (Oscar Novak).
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Before long, the little prince is on the run from his father’s murderers and mother’s kidnappers. Years later, he’s grown into a muscle-bound Alexander Skarsgård—a fierce Viking warrior and berserker burning with the pledge he made as a child: to avenge his father, rescue his mother, and kill the man who stole his kingdom.
The story turns again when Amleth discovers that a group of slaves belong to his father’s murderer and are headed to a remote farm in Iceland. Amleth joins the slaves, falls in love with Olga (Anna Joy-Taylor), and plots his vengeance.
What Eggers has done here is boost a standard genre story (revenge) into something unique and beautiful through his detailed and fascinating world. While I haven’t seen The Lighthouse (2019), what impressed me about his debut feature, 2015’s The Witch, was the world-building. The movie itself didn’t do much for me. What blew me away was the confidence of Eggers’ direction and the recreation of a 17th-century Puritan society set in New England. Everything was credible, most especially the performances and dialogue. I have no idea if Puritans in 1630 actually spoke that way. Still, Eggers’ brilliant dialogue managed to be believable, poetic, and understandable, even to a dolt like me who considers “Shakespeare” a foreign language.
In this same way, The Northman transports you back in time to more than a thousand years ago and takes you on a detailed and fascinating tour of a long-lost people and society— how they spoke, dressed, worked, lived, worshiped, and interacted.
In the midst of a beautiful world made up of oppressive grays and lush greens is a fierce and violent revenge drama driven by Skarsgård’s committed portrayal of an intense and dangerous man defined by a thirst for vengeance that threatens to destroy him.
Best of all, the poison of woke, that story-killing, joy-murdering, anti-human-nature virus is nowhere to be seen. In The Northman, men are complicated and imperfect masculine men. Women are strong and feminine women. There’s no affirmative-action intruding with its spell-breaking identity politics, or phony empowerment lectures, or any of that fake, lazy nonsense that intrudes and annihilates the story’s reality, which turns the characters and actors into one-dimensional political tokens. Instead, this is a mature movie driven by real storytelling told by adults, by a confident director determined to make his audience feel something.
And that’s exactly what Eggers accomplished.
The Northman transported, held my attention, impressed me more than once, and gave me bang for the buck.
That’s all I ask…
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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