spectacular dive into Viking folklore

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT

In just three films, Robert Eggers has specialized in historico-arty film, and likes to boast of his obsession with the verism of details, which he pushes to the point of mania: on The Lighthouse (2019), his previous film, he had made sure that the buttons on the uniforms corresponded to the period described (New England in 1890). The magnitude of a great show like The Northman, immersed in the Viking era with a budget of 90 million dollars, assured him of quenching his fetishistic thirst for detail. It is moreover the main selling point of the film to be this authentic blockbuster which, as the filmmaker likes to say, asked for the assistance of archaeologists, folklorists and historians in order to “ to recreate the physical reality of the time in its smallest details, while seeking to capture, without judging them, the soul and the psyche of the Vikings: their beliefs, their myths and their rituals”.

Eggers adapts the legend of Amleth, a Scandinavian myth that has innervated all of popular culture (from Lion King to star trek) since Shakespeare was inspired by it for his Hamlet. Tale of revenge and parentage in the Viking Age, The Northman follows the young prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard) who witnesses the assassination of his father, King Horvendill (Ethan Hawke), at the hands of his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang), who then seizes the kingdom. By a miracle, the prince manages to flee and, as an adult, becomes a warrior without faith or law. In the guise of a slave, he returns to haunt his uncle and save his mother Gudrun (Nicole Kidman). Eggers is not adapting Shakespeare’s play but is filming an original story co-written with Icelandic novelist Sjón. The two screenwriters thus wanted to reconnect the myth to its Scandinavian origins and add a whole Nordic folklore to it – in particular Icelandic sagas, prose stories which, straddling history and legend, retrace daily life at the time of the medieval Iceland.

Hallucinatory sequences

As with his two previous films, Eggers’ historical verismo is there only to serve as a launching pad for his kinetic visions, and to constantly fuel the fire of the direction. The Northman then dreams of a great theater of cruelty where sweat and blood tint purely hallucinatory sequences which, at their best moments, could almost evoke the digital experiments of Francis Ford Coppola (notably in Twixt) – the image turns golden, metallic, darkens towards abstraction.

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