Movies: The Northman
Robert Eggers' newest film, The Northman, is a spectacle of testosterone. I'm honestly not sure I have a whole lot to say about it, so this might be a relatively short review.
Also, I'm going to say up front that I probably missed a lot of the dialogue due to my trouble understanding accents without subtitles in films, so there may be subtleties I missed the first time watching this film, which I definitely plan on watching again.
Plot spoilers ahead!
The film opens in 895 AD. King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke) returns home to the island of Hrafnsey, which Google tells me is in east Iceland, after doing warrior-king stuff. He has a wife, Queen Gudrun (Nicole Kidman), and a son, Prince Amleth (Oscar Novak). Instead of taking his wife, whom he hasn't seen in months, to bed...Aurvandill does a ritual with Amleth that involves drinking something that makes them both trip balls. From my interpretation, this ritual is meant to bring father and son closer together and also initiate Amleth into manhood.
The next morning, Aurvandill is murdered by his brother, Fjolnir (Danish actor Claes Bang in a standout role). Fjornir orders his men to kill the young prince, but Amleth escapes and rows away to safety, vowing "I will avenge you Father, I will save you Mother, I will kill you Fjornir".
Years later, Amleth has grown up to become...Alexander Skarsgard! And also an incredibly fierce viking. After a raid where his group of berserkers kill a bunch of men and rape a bunch of women (the rape is only implied, not shown), Amleth hears that his uncle was overthrown by another king and he now lives on a sheep farm in Iceland. But being overthrown and living in exile is not enough punishment for Fjornir, and Amleth pretends to be a slave and boards a boat headed for Fjornir's farm. On the boat he meets Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), who informs him that while his strength might break men's bodies, her cunning will break men's minds.
Amleth comes face to face with Fjornir, his mother, and Fjornir's sons and no one recognizes him. After all, the last time they saw him, he was barely pubescent, and they have been under the impression that he was killed. So Amleth is able to get close to Fjornir's family and servants and no one is the wiser. He meets with male witch who informs him that he will need a special sword to kill Fjornir--one that can only be unsheathed at night. Amleth finds the sword and starts by killing those close to Fjornir, throwing the farm into a panic.
(meanwhile, Olga and him are fuckin'. Aw yeah.)
However, when the night comes to finally, finally avenge his father, Amleth has an interaction with his mother, Gudrun, that throws his whole life and world into question. She reveals that she hated Amleth's father and begged Fjornir to kill him. It turns out that Gudrun was Aurvandill's slave before she was his wife and that there was no love between the two of him. Amleth ends up killing her, as well as her young son by Fjornir.
The final scene is an epic, nude (no dick, tho) sword fight between Amleth and Fjornir and they...do that thing where they deal each other a killing blow at the same time, so they both die. WOOOO!!! And it's off to Valhalla with Amleth, who sees a comforting vision of Olga giving birth to twins before he dies.
So, while The Northman is very good, it didn't blow my socks off the way Eggers' previous films did (especially The Lighthouse). In many regards, the film is similar to The Green Knight in that it's a movie about how important honor was to men of the past...but also, like, the quest for honor will kill you, so...???
I do think The Green Knight is a touch more critical of "honor" and what we might call "traditional masculine values" whereas The Northman is almost completely uncritical of them. Amleth saw his father murdered, made a vow, and saw that vow through even though it led to his death. And the final scene suggests that dying in this way is the best possible death a man of that time could experience. Which is probably true! Life was nasty, brutish, and short in AD 895!
The Northman is a film that unabashedly revels in testosterone and masculinity. It's going to be a huge hit with the white supremacists too! But I don't think it was Eggers' intention to pander to toxic white men. I think he set out to make a weird, violent historical film that incorporates both history and mythology and he did it. The Northman is the film version of metal music: intense, unrelenting, primal, and something you kind of have to be in the mood for.
Grade: B+
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