With “The Northman,” we encounter the brilliant execution of a fairly demented vision. To see it is to think, simultaneously, “Wow” and “What were they thinking?!” This puts “The Northman” into a peculiar category of good movie.
After all, when you consider how many pictures get made each year, and how many have been made since Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers, if a movie makes you say, “Well, I’ve never seenthatbefore,” it’s halfway there.
Co-written by Robert Eggers (“The Lighthouse”) and Sjón (“Lamb”), “The Northman” is based on the same legend that produced Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” though the bloodbath that ends “Hamlet” would be considered a light sprinkling here. This movie presents a world of utter brutality.
It begins with a large black raven flying into the center of the frame and then darting off, as the camera moves faster and faster toward a land mass, which reveals itself to be ninth century Iceland. If someone ever builds a time machine, don’t expect ninth century Iceland to be getting many requests.
国王(伊桑·霍克)返回从最近的战争with his abdomen tightly bound in cloth, because he has been slashed and his wound is still oozing blood. For him, it’s just another day at the office. He tells his wife (played byNicole Kidman) that he is too unwell for sex, but he does find the energy for some special bonding with his teenage son. They visit a shaman and spend a fun afternoon crawling around, wearing paint and learning how to grunt like wild animals.
In “Hamlet,” it took a ghost to inform the title character that his uncle had killed his father. Here, young Amleth (Oscar Novak) witnesses the murder and has to flee Iceland by sea. In exile, he develops into a strapping fellow (Alexander Skarsgård), who is not big on self-reflection. It’s only when he and a band of like-minded marauders lay waste to a settlement that it occurs to him that maybe now would be a good time to go back to Iceland to take revenge on his uncle.
Basically, he reaches a point in life where he realizes that killing 20 people a day is no longer spiritually satisfying. From this point on, he needs to kill theright20 people.
Two-thirds into the movie, it would be fair to say that “The Northman” takes on a certain sameness, what with all the broadswords and slaughter. But what doesn’t get old is the sense of seeing something genuinely alien. Eggers puts the dark back in the Dark Ages. He depicts a world that’s not only un-survivable, but unlivable, where everything is nonstop awful, including the cuisine. The movie also never stops being interesting to look at, with its mixes of black and white and color.
For almost half of the movie, you might wonder why Nicole Kidman chose to take such a lackluster role. The answer: Just wait — and brace yourself. Kidman is never happier than when she gets to go to extremes, and by that measure, Queen Gudrun is one of her happiest roles.
Anya Taylor-Joy shows up as a Slavic slave, thick accent and all. Taylor-Joy is unable to conceal her 21st century consciousness as she looks at all around her with huge eyes and a blank expression that seems to say, “What a dump.”
Her casting is weird, but then the whole movie is weird. Somehow the casting works, just like everything else in this strange, violent movie.
M“The Northman”:Action. Starring Alexander Skarsgård, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicole Kidman and Ethan Hawke. Directed by Robert Eggers. (R. 140 minutes.) In Bay Area theaters starting Friday, April 22.