The Northman The Northman

* * * * MA15+ 2022 Action/Adventure - 2h 20m

From visionary director Robert Eggers comes The Northman, an action-filled epic that follows a young Viking prince on his quest to avenge his father's murder.

Prince Amleth is on the verge of becoming a man when his father is brutally murdered by his uncle, who kidnaps the boy's mother.

Two decades later, Amleth is now a Viking who's on a mission to save his mother, kill his uncle and avenge his father.

Rating: R (Strong Bloody Violence|Some Sexual Content|Nudity)
Genre: Action, Adventure, Mystery & Thriller
Runtime: 2h 17m

Release date: 21 April 2022 (Australia)

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89% TOMATOMETER
79% AUDIENCE SCORE

A bloody revenge epic and breathtaking visual marvel, The Northman finds filmmaker Robert Eggers expanding his scope without sacrificing any of his signature style.



There's no disputing writer-director Robert Eggers' talent for inspiring dread.

It was vigorously demonstrated in his first two features - The Witch (2015), a gruesomely persuasive tale about the workings of black magic on a family of puritans in 17thcentury New England, and The Lighthouse (2019), which puts Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe in a lighthouse on a wintry stretch of the Nova Scotia coast and has them set about driving one another crazy.

He has a gift for the gothic. Whether you want to share in it is up to you and your nervous system. He's relentless.

His new film , The Northman, is his biggest yet. It's a 10th-century Viking saga starring a bulked-up Alexander Skarsgard as Amleth, the Nordic warrior whose revenge legend was Shakespeare's inspiration for Hamlet. But don't expect any of Hamlet's doubting and dithering.

At the age of nine, Amleth watches his father being butchered by his brother and barely manages to escape with his life. From that moment, he's obsessed with the need to see his uncle die as painfully as possible.

He survives by finding a handy rowing boat and fetching up among a ferocious but understanding tribe who ensure that he acquires all the skills necessary for reaching adulthood. He can run, jump and hack somebody to death with a single stroke of his broadsword. What more can you ask?

As it happens, he does need one more attribute and it doesn't come easily. He is forced to become acquainted with patience as well as having to feign humility since his only way of getting to his uncle, Fjolnir (Claes Bang), is to become a slave. Having lost his throne during an enemy invasion, Fjolnir is living as a sheep farmer with Amleth's mother, Gudrun (Nicole Kidman), now his wife, in Iceland and a shipment of slaves is heading his way.

Movies set in the ancient world are always at risk of parody. There's something about the air of solemnity that so often envelops the past that makes ridicule irresistible. Game of Thrones got round the problem with the cleverness of the intrigues animating its plots and its almost casual attitude to the brutality that went with them. They left you too shocked to laugh.

Eggers' films work differently. He has no time for caustic dialogue or devious politicking. But he does share Game of Thrones' interest in the part played by the supernatural in the lives of the ancients.

Amleth, for example, has been raised in the belief that his spirit animals are the wolf and the bear, which entails a lot of grunting and howling at the moon.

And it's a measure of Eggers' skill that he makes this work to hallucinogenic effect with little more than sinister lighting and a nerveracking soundtrack. He even manages to have you accept Bjork as a prophetess kitted out in a dazzling array of ethnic finery .

Yet, this is a film which takes itself so seriously that I couldn't subdue the temptation to look for slip-ups . At one point, Amleth and his love interest, Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy ) suddenly appear spruced up to a standard suggesting a lightning visit to some trendy outfitter in sustainable textiles.

But it's a rare moment. The measure of Eggers' standing as a director can be seen in the film's casting. Bjork is said to have come out of her retirement from acting to make her brief appearance while Dafoe has a similarly short speech as a jester at the court of Amleth's father. Kidman has rather more scope with one particularly chilling speech, although she's rather too glamorous for the grunginess of the prevailing atmosphere.

It's an impressive piece of time travel. Eggers succeeds in conjuring up a world governed exclusively by blood feuds and territorial imperatives.

Review by SANDRA HALL from the April 21, 2022 issue of The Age Digital Edition. To subscribe, visit "https://www.theage.com.au".

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