(There’s never a scene in this film in which we don’t have the pleasure of watching at least one great actor leaning all the way into the material. Nicole Kidman is only nine years older than Skarsgård and there’s no attempt to age her character over the decades, proving that even in the 10 th century, Hollywood never blinks at this sort of gender-biased aging of actresses, but she delivers effectively duplicitous work while Dafoe and Hawke lend bearded intensity to their outstanding supporting performances. Alexander Skarsgård has never been the most emotive of actors, but he’s perfectly cast here as the ferociously vengeance-minded Amleth, with Anya-Taylor Joy lending her wonderful ethereal weirdness (and I mean that in the best possible way) to Olga.
With director Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke alternating between vibrant bursts of saturated colors and muted tones of stormy skies filled with ominous clouds and flocks of ravens (there’s a reason the official term for a flock is “Unkindness of Ravens”) and snowflakes that dance in the sky like embers in the aftermath of a deadly fire, “The Northman” holds our attention with the unforgettable visuals and the sheer, raw audacity of its premise and its unrelenting violence. Unforgettable was his first chance to work with a larger budget (20 million, eight times that of his previous film) and to have his film advertised and distributed as it should be, but the result, though well made and fairly engrossing, is primarily a busier but less interesting treatment of Dahl’s previous themes. Drawing on the same well of Scandinavian culture and folklore (with a sprinkling of known historical events) that provided the foundation for Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Eggers and his co-writer, the Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón, have crafted a sprawling and visceral tale with elements of everything from “Gladiator” to “Conan the Barbarian” to “Braveheart,” and at times it reminded me of a particularly pricey episode of “Game of Thrones.” Greatly enhancing that mix is a cast of some of our most interesting actors, from Ethan Hawke to Nicole Kidman to Anya Taylor-Joy to the Skarsgårds Alexander and Bill to Willem Dafoe as “Heimir the Fool” and if you’re casting your Viking epic and there’s a call for a “Heimir the Fool,” who better to answer that call than Willem Dafoe?
Director Eggers (“The Witch,” “Lighthouse”) is a boldly creative visionary, and his stunning visuals and hallucinatory staging of scenes makes for the kind of movie that really should be seen on the big screen. This is not to say “The Northman” itself is unrelentingly grim.
Even the kings and queens and landowners in this fiery fever dream seem miserable and unfulfilled, while just about everyone else is either a brutally cruel henchman guarding and abusing slaves in forced labor camps, or one of the legions of slaves who are treated as sub-human creatures. Robert Eggers’ bloody and bone-cracking and yet beautiful Viking saga “The Northman” is set primarily in 10th-century Iceland-but every frame of this 137-minute epic makes us feel as if we’ve been plunged neck-deep into the violent dread of Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell.
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