The Northman

Directed by Robert Eggers

Running time: 2hr17 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Alexander Skarsgård in The Northman

Blood runs, mud flies and bones crack — in crisp, percussive ways you’ve hopefully never heard in real life — throughout The Northman, a grand, gut-spilling Norse epic that feels at once earthily ancient and thrillingly modern. Plunging us into a Viking Age of elemental survival strategies and unfettered masculine brutality, Robert Eggers’ film shows off all the immersive world-building a huge Hollywood budget can buy, minus any obvious studio lacquer: everything here feels whittled from stone, woven from flesh, grown from the ground up, and then destroyed in a frenzy of bruising, exactingly choreographed warfare. By the time Björk shows up in a cameo — her first film appearance in 17 years — as a hollow-eyed mystic, you feel genuinely transported to another dimension. The Northman is a film touched by madness, that also happens to know exactly what it’s doing.

With so much overwhelming sensory detail at play, Eggers keeps the story back-of-a-postcard simple. When his father, King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke), is murdered by his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang), young Prince Amleth flees and grows into the formidable form of Alexander Skarsgård, returning years later to avenge his father’s death, rescue his mother Gudrun (Nicole Kidman, revealing complex layers of feminine desire and pragmatism in this testosterone-driven tale) and reclaim his kingdom. If it sounds familiar, that’s no accident. Eggers is working from the medieval Scandinavian legend of Amleth, which centuries later trickled down into Shakespeare’s Hamlet; in Hollywood terms, The Northman shares DNA with The Lion King, if not a whole lot else.

But as with Eggers’ previous films, the febrile period visions The Witch and The Lighthouse, it’s less about the story, and more about the go-for-broke telling, from the rich, flavourful historical idiom in which he writes — this time in collaboration with revered Icelandic poet Sjón — to the vast, visceral, carved-in-wood imagery that gives the words their weight. Meanwhile, the stripped, linear narrative is complicated by an anxious, uncertain moral conscience that you don’t find in, say, Gladiator: Amleth is unwaveringly determined to have his revenge in this life or the next, yet as much as we understand his motives, the more he slashes and slays his way toward that goal, the more we question its value. Disturbing and exhilarating at once, The Northman is troubled by toxic cycles of male violence, even as it gets us waist-deep in battle.

THE NORTHMAN (2022) Written by Robert Eggers and Sjón | Shot by Jarin Blaschke | Edited by Louise Ford

In cinemas now.