The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B-
It takes either massive balls or a lot of stupidity or both to make a $90 million arthouse film and that is basically what director Robert Eggers has done with The Northman. Considering that few such productions exist nowadays that aren’t based on a comic book, I at least have to admire the man’s ambition. Eggers became a critical darling with his first two films, The Witch and The Lighthouse, and, while The Northman will be far more crowd-pleasing for mainstream audiences than those earlier works, Eggers often struggles to balance a straightforward narrative with his penchant for pretentious diversions. The result is a film that is often very good, but never great, as it is too entertaining for art fans and too artsy for action fans. When considered as some weird middle-ground between those realms, The Northman is entertaining if not particularly memorable.
Taking place around the year 900, The Northman tells the story of Amleth (played by Alexander Skarsgård). Amleth is the son of a king and, as a young boy, witnesses his father be betrayed and murdered by his uncle. The uncle violently takes over the kingdom, takes Amleth’s mother as his own wife and attempt to kill the boy. Amleth escapes, though, and vows to return as a man to avenge his father and save his mother. So, in other words, it’s Hamlet. But it is Hamlet mixed with a sword and sorcery tale….which basically makes it Conan the Barbarian. True, many literary historians believe that Shakespeare was inspired by the legend of Amleth in the first place, but that doesn’t change the fact that originality isn’t exactly The Northman’s strong suit. If you acted it out with animals, you would get The Lion King. You get the point, we’ve seen this before.
Following his vow of vengeance as a young boy, Amleth grows up to become a berserker in a band of Vikings. He one day discovers that his uncle has since been defeated by the king of Norway and has been exiled in Iceland. With this knowledge, he enacts an absurdly complicated plan to be kidnapped by his uncles men, taken as a slave and then screw with them for a long time before actually taking his revenge. Viking berserkers are not exactly known for stealth and espionage missions, so this is a bizarre path that severely bogs down the rest of the film’s running time. Considering that Amleth is established as a human wrecking ball and is in a band of psychotically vicious killers, I frequently wondered why he didn’t simply take the other Vikings on a mission to Iceland, slaughter everyone in sight and have his revenge. That would have been the more satisfying and logical path, but turning the film into a viking-era Metal Gear Solid mission certainly pads the running time.
The other primary issue is the film’s bizarre tonal shifts and inability to establish a clear set of rules for its world. One moment, The Northman is very much set in a world of brutal reality. The next moment, it is set in a world of fantasy with fighting skeletons guarding magical swords and witches predicting the future. This blending can work (like in Conan the Barbarian), but it feels jarring in The Northman because the world never feels cohesive enough to bring these elements together. Anytime supernatural happens, I was momentarily surprised because I forgot that such things openly exist in this world. Eggers also can’t resist including the occasional foray into pretentious and psychedelic moments that do nothing to serve the plot. The most egregious example is Willem Dafoe’s early appearance as a jester that gets our hero high as balls and howling like a wolf as he prances around a fire. As much as I love Dafoe (and as much as somebody is probably going to tell me that these scenes are a brilliant commentary on masculinity), such scenes elicited nothing but unintentional laughter in my theater and should have been cut.
Despite those issues, there are many moments in The Northman that are the best that I’ve seen in a film this year. This is a brutal film with some of the most vicious action scenes that I’ve seen in years. The world of The Northman makes the Scotland of Braveheart seem downright cheerful and safe by comparison, as people are stabbed, beaten and axed to death with disturbingly casual regularity. Eggers is a very talented visual director and the action scenes (often composed with long, continuous shots) are aesthetically beautiful while being downright disturbing. This is a world with no good people, only varying degrees of terrible people. Our protagonist is a man that stands by as women and children are locked in a hut and set on fire as he casually surveys another conquered village with another crop of men to butcher and women to rape. And that’s the dude that we’re supposed to be rooting for. Eggers has created a truly horrific (if not always coherent) world and the sheer brutality is often the kind of cinematic gut punch that is rarely seen in modern cinemas.
The performances are also excellent, not surprising given the A-list cast that Eggers has assembled. Skarsgård ably carries the film as a frightening bulldozer of a man that manages to evoke sympathy from the audience despite being an utterly unsympathetic monster. That is hard to pull off, especially for a script that isn’t exactly rife with character-building dialogue. Nicole Kidman and Anya Taylor Joy also bring more to fairly mundane and familiar roles than the script deserves and even Defoe, as unnecessary as his character and scenes may be, is as creepily endearing as ever. The movie even has frigging Björk as (what else?) a witch. I can’t remember the last time I saw her.
Well-acted and shot, The Northman is a tale as old as time infused with nihilism and barbaric violence. This is a story that we’ve all seen before whether we know it or not. It may have been in a play or a cartoon, but you have likely seen some iteration of The Northman before. The question is whether this version of the timeless story brings enough to the table to warrant a viewing and my answer is a marginal affirmative.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Northman#/media/File:The_Northman.png
