Although Robert Eggers has only three feature films to his name so far, audiences already know what to expect from his work. Otherworldly, weird, intensely individual and universal at the same time, with a strange sense of humor and a fascination with esoteric within a well-worn mythic structure, Eggers’s films examine the heart of darkness within cultures at once foreign and deeply familiar. Whether or not he’s always successful in his project, he’s yet to make an uninteresting film, and he hasn’t broken that streak yet. His latest, The Northman, is a Norse epic, feminist diatribe, and family drama in one, and is exactly what you’d expect from the director and writer of The Witch and The Lighthouse.
The Northman follows Amleth (Alexander Skarsgaard), the son of King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke) and Queen Gudrun (Nicole Kidman), who vows vengeance when his uncle Fjolnir (Claes Bang) murders his father and kidnaps his mother. As a child, Amleth escapes the assassination to join a band of marauding Vikings, and we next see him laying waste to a Slavic village and carrying off the strongest inhabitants as slaves. When a chance encounter leads Amleth to discover where his uncle has gone, he believes the fates have given him the opportunity to fulfill his promise. He disguises himself as a slave to be transported to Iceland, where his uncle, mother, and cousins tend a sheep farm. There he meets Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), a Slavic woman who complicates his single-minded quest for vengeance.
If Eggers’s previous films were difficult and confounding, The Northman is far more accessible…but that’s no knock against it, nor does it reduce the cultural or mythological complexity of the narrative. Eggers has a clear concept of the genre in which he’s working and brings similar sensibilities about faith and horror that he did to his first two films. Despite being on a grander scale, The Northman is just as claustrophobic and intimate as its predecessors—the windswept oceans and mountains of Norway and Iceland replace the wilds of Puritan New England and the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean, but are still the sites of isolation and intense interpersonal relationships shaped by social and religious systems, and individual psychosis. In Eggers’s films, the characters are embedded in their society, its cultures and traditions and faiths, and are shaped by it, victims and victimizers alike. He understands, perhaps better than any of his contemporaries, the violence inherent in the system and the circuitous nature of trauma.
The story evades glorifying Norse or Viking culture while respecting the world in which the characters live. Amleth is trapped in a circle of trauma and toxicity, but he has the choice to break free from it—the superstructure of the narrative itself does not require his sacrifice, as it does Oedipus or even Hamlet. The film rather supposes that it is his belief in his fate that traps him within the cycle. Olga presents an alternative, a worship of the earth and the offer of rebirth, that Amleth begins to work towards. But it is Amleth’s culture of destruction and patriarchy that seems to doom him; without mincing words, Eggers exposes the cult of death inherent in toxic masculinity.
The Northman deftly appears to be about one thing while slyly indicating that it will be about something else. As with The Witch and The Lighthouse, Eggers utilizes a deceptively straightforward story informed by legend or myth (a family plagued by a witch, two men stranded in a lighthouse, a son taking vengeance for the murder of his father) to explore the complexities within the cultures he depicts and attempt to say something about our own. Eggers returns to myth and legend again and again, in different milieus, yes, but with the same basic idea—to dig into the past that has so shaped our current culture.
In its own way, The Northman is a challenging film by being so deceptively simple; it refuses easy categorization (this is not a Norse fantasy epic, as much as some PR firms want it to be) and utilizes the recognizable narrative to interweave a deeply complex mythos of history, religion, superstition, and legend. It contains spectacular performances and a writer/director who has only become more assured in his work as time has gone on. While the violence, blood, and mud won’t be for everyone, The Northman is a rewarding film for those who venture into its wilderness.
The Northman is in theaters and available to rent on VOD.
