Just seven years ago, a little-known filmmaker named Robert Eggers debuted his brilliant feature-length debut, The Witch—an extraordinary exploration of 17th-century religious hysteria, familial dysfunction, and folk horror. The unqualified critical praise that followed its Sundance premiere was more than justified. Four years later, Eggers returned with The Lighthouse, an equally brilliant 19th-century dissection of isolation, madness, and mermaids. His second effort all but confirmed his status as a world-class talent working in or out of the art-horror sub-genre. Only Eggers’s contemporary—writer-director Ari Aster— deserves to be discussed in similar terms of talent or output. Eggers conveyed his singular obsession with period authenticity into every meticulously hand-crafted frame, in every intentional camera move, and in every heavily researched line of mythopoetic dialogue.
Adapted by Eggers with Icelandic poet-novelist Sjón (Lamb) from the same source material William Shakespeare used for the slightly better-known Hamlet, this third feature-length film, The Northman, centres on Amleth (Oscar Novak), a prince and heir to a minor kingdom ruled by Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) and his queen, Gudrún (Nicole Kidman). Amleth’s idyllic existence is highlighted by a peculiarly unique father-son bonding session involving a shaman-fool (Willem Dafoe), hallucinogens, and literal animalistic howling, which ends abruptly at the sharpened edge of Aurvandil’s half-brother’s (Claes Bang) weapon. Fjölnir takes Aurvandil’s kingdom, makes Gudrún his wife, and orders Amleth’s execution.
Amleth escapes certain death but only after promising to avenge his father, save his mother, and kill his uncle. It’s far easier vowed than done and a multi-decade interlude begins, where Amleth, now an outcast without title or property, grows up into a mega-brooding, hulking berserker (Alexander Skarsgård). Between the foundational trauma of losing everything at an early, impressionable age and the unbreakable vow he made then, Amleth’s future seems to involve Viking-era pillaging, plundering, and dying in combat (hello, Valhalla). That’s before, though, an unnamed seeress played by Björk in a remarkably memorable cameo, reminds Amleth of an immutable fate defined by the vow he made decades earlier.
Where Shakespeare’s conscience-stricken Hamlet fatally hesitates in taking revenge against his brother-killing uncle and duplicitous mother, sealing his own fate, Eggers and Sjón leverage the idea of hesitation into a conflict between fate. Alongside that existential struggle comes Amleth’s long-buried desire for domesticity in the form of Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy). Olga is a Russian woman taken as a result of The Northman’s first extended set-piece, an elaborately choreographed, four-minute single take that pits Amleth and his fellow berserkers against a lightly defended Russian village. (Spoiler: The Russian village doesn’t stand a chance.)
As bravura as anything in Eggers’s short, remarkable career, that first set-piece will linger in the audience’s minds as both mesmerizing and horrific. The filmmaker deliberately challenges the audience to continue their presumptive identification with Amleth and his quest. It’s a risk Eggers obviously considered and accepted when making The Northman, though it’s certainly likely to make some moviegoers or viewers hit the pause button and either bail or become apathetic toward Amleth’s blood- and gore-filled quest. They’ll still be pulled in by Eggers’ obsessive attention to period detail and visual style, but may keep Amleth and the characters in The Northman at arm’s length, their individual and collective fates more like pawns or minor pieces swept off a chessboard by a temperamental toddler.
For those who aren’t alienated by the outcome of that first, brutal set-piece, Eggers’ exploration of Amleth’s monomaniacal journey suggests an inherent, if not necessarily original, critique of revenge narratives (i.e., who becomes the point of identification and why). And for Amleth, whose life has been defined by an intractable, inescapable vow (fate less as a mystical or supernatural form than a social, cultural, and political one), that journey comes full circle back to the foundational, life-altering experience watching his uncle commit regicide. It’s a toxic, ultimately destructive form of masculinity that leads in only one direction at the metaphorical, if not literal, gates of hell. Even as Olga, a pagan witch of sorts, offers another option (i.e., domesticity), Amleth can only see the vow he must fulfill and the fate he must embrace. That Amleth can’t bring himself to see any alternatives becomes, like Hamlet’s well-documented hesitation, his fatal flaw.
While it’s impossible to separate his narrative from his visual style, Eggers continues his seemingly meteoric ascent to world-class filmmaker status, expanding his toolkit to encompass a breathtakingly intense, attention-grabbing, single-take approach to scene and story creation unlike anything else. It’s an approach that can be expensive (a reported $90M budget for a superhero- and spandex-free film) and demands next-level commitment from his collaborators on either side of the camera, including cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, editor Louise Ford, production designer Craig Lathrop, and costume designer Linda Muir, all of whom worked on Eggers first and second feature-length films.
The Northman opens in the U.S. and Canada tomorrow.
