MAN!!

Probably my favorite shot in The Northman: I love just how “staged” it looks (how unnaturally symmetrical). The whiplash of cutting from the film’s protagonist, Amleth, tearing out a man’s throat and howling to this almost contemplative, The Last Supper-ian image depicting the previously berserk raiders at rest is just great juxtaposition. I love the dramatic posing as well and the feelings that the figures’ posture and the overall composition evoke. There’s something unsettled—and not just physically exhausted—about the men post-rampage. They look if not exactly meditative, then quiet: drained. Alone with their post-battle clarity. Perhaps toxically masculine in some vague way.

My current Robert Eggers filmography rankings (sans 2024’s Nosferatu, which I haven’t seen): The Northman (2022), The Lighthouse (2019), The VVitch (2015). In terms of his “The” trilogy, I think the one I watched most recently takes the top spot, though I will admit this is somewhat unfair to VVitch since I haven’t seen it in quite a while. Lighthouse is probably my “favorite,” and I’m not sure if he can top it—As a weird, moody Little Tale and as a claustrophobic showcase for Willem Dafoe’s and Robert Pattinson’s dueling performances, it may be unbeatable, especially by a film as “big” as Northman (or as Nosferatu seems to be). My shameful secret is that I am not immune to big stuff, however. I must needs admit that I took strongly to this movie in part because it does offer the sturdy certainty of familiar narrative beats arranged in comfortable ways. I love The Lighthouse as a whole, but I wouldn’t call its ending “satisfying,” for example. Meanwhile, The Northman is a pleasing, predictable action movie with a little bit of an edge, if I had to evaluate it succinctly.

What The Northman does is essentially compromise between accessibility and mood. In wholly practical terms, that’s what it undoubtedly takes to get a movie made at this scale, but I’m also speaking spiritually. Internally, in terms of its inner self, it has a foot in both worlds: that of easy pleasures (revenge, combat, sex, gore) and that of artisticism, weirdography. I do like that it front-loads some of the latter, with the eventual-revenger Amleth and his father pretending to be dogs and then proving they aren’t dogs, at Willem Dafoe’s urging, by burping and farting before taking a ritualistic father-son drug trip together so that Amleth can see the heart-blood tree that represents his lineage and can inherit the onus of the ruler (just in time for his treacherous uncle’s coup that forces him into exile). The phrase “rent-lowering gunshots” popped into my head during the aforementioned scene and at other points in the film, typically when someone was looking uncannily at me through the screen. I like that there’s a sort of trial-by-fire, stylistically, for… Co-Worker and/or RETVRN types who might go into this to see some blood and some glistening, toned, manly flesh straining in conservatively heroic ways.

If I continue to be utterly honest, I put off watching this movie for three reasons: 1) I am mentally ill, but, also, 2) I was worried it might be middling, and 3) I wasn’t sure just how gory and upsetting it would be. I don’t like entrails or sexual violence all that much, and this sort of stoop-necked, broad-shouldered, dead-eyed Viking Revenge Epic seemed like it might indulge (and so I watched my DVD copy for the first go-round to blunt the edge of anything objectionable via a less clear image). It does have both, but the second especially hangs around like a phantom just out of frame. I never saw anything directly in my line of vision, but there are shots of innocents (women and children) being handled in ways that make you worry about what’s going to happen to them when they’re off-screen. Maybe it’s deliberate use of the visual language of marauderly rapaciousness only up to a point or it’s just my paranoia. The violence is much more visible, but also interestingly not. There is some really gruesome stuff in the film, but The Northman doesn’t feel like it indulges. It often depicts and then moves on. The fight scenes are particularly interesting in this regard because of certain lightly idiosyncratic choices about what is and isn’t focused on. There’s a degree of obfuscation that you might interpret as artistry for how it feels like a small act of resistance in the face of the aforementioned easy pleasures. If I was to sum it up imprecisely, I would say the undergirding philosophy seems to be that not every violent act needs to be seen. The temptation would be to hard-lock the camera (and by extension the audience’s eyes) onto every clash of sharp-edged weaponry and every gouging of flesh and cut, cut, cut to draw out every last drop of excitement, tension, and revulsion, but there’s sometimes a surprising remove that makes me, Le Critic, smile and cross my arms and nod quietly in enjoyment (cuz there’s something Going On here, visually—or, you know, the fights are filmed somewhat seamlessly as a flourish and so must be choreographed in a way that mimes or minimizes blows landing).

In a similar vein, the dialogue and delivery of said dialogue strike me as meaning-full—The film is not mirthless at all, but its drama is often unashamedly straight-faced. Its words are simultaneously wooden and poetic. As much as it hedges where violence is concerned and compromises moodiness/strangeness to provide a relatively conventionally enjoyable viewing experience, its words feel unyielding to me. Whether you see this as Literary or just… approximately “historical” depends on your predilection, I suppose. Tonally, such a stance befits a harsh, uncompromising world. This just makes the magical elements or moments (even if they’re grotesque in some way) feel more satisfying and full by contrast. My latent fantasy-reading teenager delighted at the rules governing Amleth’s revenging magic blade, for example: It can only be drawn at night or at the Gates of Hel, which means Amleth physically isn’t allowed to use it to kill his uncle ahead of fate’s schedule when he’s sorely tempted at one point, and when he later has to fight during the day, he wields the sword sheathed as a bludgeon. As he actively began to take his revenge through nightly acts of killing, it struck me how we were witnessing a VVitch-esque folk horror scenario from the perspective of the monster. The attacks are identified as supernatural by the rattled farm folk, which lends a sense of strength (and, yes, of coolness as well) to Amleth’s actions. Rather than fear, we’re meant to delight in the systematic destruction of uncle Fjölnir’s life, which isn’t all that different from how the settler family of The VVitch were abused. Amleth’s haunting of his uncle and the psychological warfare against his household might be my favorite part of the film for the concept alone.

The most interesting moment in this—familial—regard (and possibly the most interesting moment in the film outright) is when Amleth finally manages to meet with his mother, who has become Fjölnir’s wife, and we learn the truth about his father’s death—That she was in on it is a fine-enough twist if not necessarily surprising. What is interesting and moving is how this conversation demolishes Amleth’s childish understanding of his parents’ relationship. In a way, he has been stuck as a child, never permitted (or forced?) to undergo the process of disillusionment with the people that raised him, and which represents a core of recognizable truth about the human experience beneath the fantastical façade. Literally, he lost his father and had to leave his mother behind to grow up elsewhere; figuratively, he’s still back in that clearing where he watched his father die. He took his parents at face value then and continued to do so into adulthood: his father a good and kind man (and ruler), his mother a loving wife. That she was a slave and was assaulted by Aurvandil, whereas she actually loves Fjölnir and has been with him (and With him) willingly, is a great revelation. Honestly, it might be needlessly undermined by her propositioning Amleth at the end of their interaction. Even as likely just a strategy to get him to drop his guard, that so obviously depraved act makes her a little too wacky and her legitimate grievances, and their significance, easier to write off. It makes rooting for her death too easy.

Yet it’s an interesting subversion for the audience if they think about it—We start with Fjölnir, with his predictably evil dark hair, versus Aurvandil, with his good-guy lighter locks, but, in the end, it turns out the former hasn’t done much of anything the latter didn’t also do. It ultimately adds a tantalizing theoretical ambivalence to Amleth’s quest for vengeance that’s in practice run over, roughshod, in the audience’s mind by the fact that we personally are aligned with Amleth and his interests, so, like him, we’re in this thing to the bitter end, despite watching him quite early in the movie visit an act of violence upon a village that doesn’t look so dissimilar to what Fjölnir wrought back at Hrafnsey. Actually: Fjölnir committed a coup and would conceivably want to keep a lot of what he conquered, seeing as a kingdom needs people and as his purpose was to seize power and set up shop, whereas Amleth was a raider, coldly taking what was valuable while razing the rest before roving on. It’s not that we aren’t also made aware of his regret, as he zeroes-in on the structure where the undesirables post-conquest are being burned alive after witnessing a young boy crying for his mother, and even has a tear-streak-like smear of blood on his otherwise frigid face to drive the point home, but so what? Fjölnir is a friggin’ farmer now! Even if it was against his will, his glory is already gone and he’s left playing at rule in an Icelandic wasteland. At this point, Amleth is grave -robbing and -defiling. And, again, the movie knows—When he won’t leave with the under-utilized witch he loves, Olga, we’re clearly supposed to see the act of returning to finish the revenge as both heroic and tragic. And perhaps the movie could have leaned harder, atheistically, on the tragedy. That Amleth could have finally seen the situation at Hrafnsey for what it was and continued down a path of healing when offered the chance to just walk away but instead took the predictable, stereotypically masculine, path to an early grave by refusing to break a child’s oath of absolute loyalty that was made in (frankly: excusable) ignorance. The promise of a glorious afterlife for him in Valhöll feels like perhaps too much of a certainty.

I will acknowledge the Literary value of this depiction—We don’t watch, say, Shakespeare to see characters make only smart choices, and lots of real people do let some perceived destiny rule them. There’s a distinctly, deliberately “traditional” vibe here, seeing, for example, as the film opens with an invocation and some lines at points throughout struck me as particularly alliterative or featured hyphenation in stilted but also evocative ways. In the credits, character roles are identified by names alongside descriptive titles, like “Finnr The Nose-Stub.” This is arguably not a modern story peddling unacknowledged toxicity so much as it is a deliberate attempt to recreate something hoary and formal with slick modern technology (and maybe comment on it a little), and thus to re-render it as visceral once more for an inattentive, dopamine-deficient audience. At what point does the obvious epic tragedy become trite, though? (Does the injection of intermittent trippy-ness, together with an overall refreshingly guileless approach to the subject matter, redeem it?)

The boring question I’ll end on—and also a secret fourth reason I was a little leery of The Northman—is how much this movie might resonate with white nationalist freaks. Our last image of Olga, with her unassuming garb and blonde hair and pale skin and twin children, isn’t so different from the sort of trad-y, retvrn-y, vaguely Viking-adjacent conservative imagery you see staged or AI-generated online. The woman in the wheat field, barefoot by the cow, a White babe in a sling round the chest, chickens and toddlers nipping at her vulnerable pink heels… Maybe it's for the best Amleth died fighting in an active volcano? (Died fighting naked against his naked uncle in an active volcano. Between this, the kiss with his mother, and the visual of his father revealing his war wound and forcing Amleth to touch it as part of an initiation into manhood, there is an undercurrent of incestuous eroticism in The Northman. Fjölnir’s final strike is a thrust as the two mutually finish one another off. Unable to bed nor blast his mother, Amleth instead takes his heat in hand and abruptly runs through his cousin-brother, the slender and soft-haired Thórir. He comes back later to impale mother as well.) I guess the reasonable take would be that we can’t cede the entirety of this culture and history and iconography, even as abstracted and caricaturized and bastardized and collaged all to death as it so often is, to racists. Furthermore, I’d imagine that Eggers as a notorious historical-detail obsessive couldn’t be fond of the mélange that chuds’ve made of this supposedly quintessentially white culture as they purport to celebrate and revive it. But still I wonder if the action could have been a bit less glorious—that final shot of Olga a bit less idealistic—in the name of undermining in some small way the never-ending video-game-ification of The Viking. I don’t think the mystical or horrific or… unconventionally erotic elements would drive the ignoramuses away. The horror is ultimately empowering rather than exclusively off-putting since it can be of the unsettling screaming and tendon-straining bloodsport sort, and nationalism is often at least kind of fruity and also… focused on the family. I don’t know that the rent-lowering gunshots are effective, I mean! The gunshots might sound pretty enticing to these weirdos, in fact! Assuming they can hack it with the doggy roleplay early on—and certain sporadic… undignified moments throughout (some bear and/or wolf roleplay a bit later?)—there’s a lot here those unsavory types would like, which, reason be damned, makes me ultimately like The Northman that bit less.