I am not old enough to have met a Viking in person so I don’t know how they really looked like, though out of the many fantasies our perverted imagination produced about them, one above all I like to think true—that they could actually grab a spear in flight, turn it with one hand, and throw it back. Robert Eggers’s muscular epic distils in two hours of cold and grunts and fire, centuries of literature, legends, iconography of one of the most attractive populations in history, and one that recursively inspired legions of artists of any sort. But where the aesthetics gloriously succeed, everything else limps and eventually stumbles, making The Northman land not far enough from an empty Lion King with vain Shakespearean ambitions, and confirming that Eggers’s narrative skills are not yet as developed as his visual instincts. ‘A good revenge movie always works. Even if you don’t personally believe in the idea of vengeance, you know it’ll be fun to watch.’1 True that, yet to me the potential of both the material and the author deserved a lot more than the fun-to-watch element.
While the ethereal presence of Anya Taylor-Joy, the beardy animality of Ethan Hawke, and Alexander Skarsgård’s physical and dramatic intensity are to be regarded among the heights of the film, I found Nicole Kidman miscast, her performance off, and her character in itself poorly written. As a similarly missed opportunity, it is a brilliant intuition that Amleth should eventually discover to have sought revenge for the wrong man, and therefore be torn between seeing King Aurvandil as a caring father, a ruthless ruler, or a brutish husband—but of this intriguing emotional complexity, there’s only a superficial hint that lasts the time of a couple of shots and disappears immediately after. Too bad, and yet for some reason I am already looking forward to his next.
1.Robert Eggers: ‘This is me trying to do Conan the Barbarian by way of Andrei Rublev’, Charles Bramesco (Little White Lies, 12 April 2022).
