In battle, he wears a wolf’s head to channel that predator’s ferocity. Off the field, Amleth says little, with Skarsgård’s gruff, preverbal grunting evoking Tom Hardy as Mad Max. Years go by and the young boy (Oscar Novak) once destined for the throne has become an animalistic warrior (Alexander Skarsgård) with deadened eyes and a cold heart. When Amleth’s father, King Aurvandill (a delightfully brusque Ethan Hawke), is slain by uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang), the impetuous kid swears vengeance. In Eggers’s hands, it is at once a phantasmagoric quest filled with spirits and magic and a gory, cruel, sometimes repetitive hero’s journey that, because of its checkpoint-like structure (Amleth is often bouncing around between mysterious characters in search of items and bits of backstory), feels at times like a video game. But The Northman is not a straight sword-and-sandals adaptation of the Icelandic and Norse sagas from which it draws its cosmology. The film has all the trappings that come with such legendary foundations: intricately crafted costumes, historically accurate sets and weapons, well-enunciated dialogue in ancient languages, and paeans to a world ruled by tradition. The tale here is one of brutality, betrayal, and destiny-the origin story of Viking warrior-prince Amleth, the historical figure who would eventually inspire Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In The Northman, Eggers’s latest period piece set across Scandinavia between 895 and 950 A.D., we are presented first with a static frame: a roiling volcano looms in the distance as a gravelly voice calls to the Norse gods. Seemingly the only way Eggers’s characters can pierce the veil separating one reality from another is through some kind of ecstatic experience, which itself can only be reached through extreme trauma or disruption. Put another way, Eggers is interested in the extrasensory: what some might call liminal states of mind, and others the supernatural. In each of Robert Eggers’s three feature films to date, the director hones in on these ruptures in the fabric of the world, waiting for something mysterious and otherworldly to break through. As the boy reaches in, he passes into the ether: suddenly, he witnesses a pantheon of his royal ancestors all connected by a branch-like umbilical cord to a cosmic family tree. Sign up for the Letter here.Įarly in The Northman, a father forces his young son to thrust his hand into an open wound in the elder’s stomach.
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