I’ve always been rather fascinated by Vikings ever since I learned that it wasn’t a noun. They didn’t come from a place called Vikingia.
They were people who actively went Viking – ordinary Scandinavian farmers and fishermen who were sick of scraping a living from the icy land and sea and preferred to rob other people scraping a living that way.
Photo: screenshot
And in the bleak winter nights they told each other long, rambling, violent tales. The Norse sagas made Game of Thrones look like Little Women.
And The Northman is strictly from that blueprint.
Writer-director Robert Eggers’ last film was the black and white tale of men going mad on the rocks – The Lighthouse.
There are no lights to speak of in The Northman, set as it is in tenth century Iceland.
A king – Ethan Hawke – returns home after a few months Viking, to be welcomed, in order of enthusiasm, by his young son Amleth, his wife Queen Gudrun – a fiery Nicole Kidman – and his brother Fjolnir.
Fjolnir obviously has plans that don’t include his brother. No, he doesn’t pour poison into the king’s ear, preferring the more direct Viking method of chopping off his head.
Amleth flees, using his own chant of vengeance to indicate the passing of 20 years or so. Amleth becomes Alexander Skarsgard, now a warlord with a renegade bunch of Vikings. But no ordinary Vikings. These are berserkers.
Going berserk was a career path among ambitious Vikings, and The Northman gives us ample opportunities to see how they do it.
One day, after a satisfying amount of rape and pillage, Amleth discovers that his wicked uncle Fjolnir was driven from his home to an even drearier part of Iceland. Our hero decides to go there, disguised as a slave, and wait for the chance of revenge.
On the voyage there Amleth meets another slave, the beautiful Olga of the Birch Forest, played by Anya Taylor-Joy.
Olga claims to be a white witch, or seer. By now Amleth should be used to people predicting his future. There’s one played by Willem Dafoe, who explains Amleth can’t escape his fate, a second seer shortly after Dad was killed was an exotic purveyor of hocus-pocus played by Icelandic singer Bjork.
And later Amleth and Olga find yet another cave-dwelling soothsayer who tells them they have to choose between, basically, being nice or being horrible.
No prizes for guessing which way your average Viking is going to go.
The Northman is certainly getting rave reviews from critics with strong stomachs, who praise Robert Eggers’ authenticity – or at least how close it sticks to the original source material.
Personally, my own interest in Vikings tended to be more how they fit into the history of Northern Europe.
They were essentially a nihilistic force, dishing out mayhem without fear or favour. It’s no coincidence that Shakespeare’s Hamlet, drawing on much the same material, also ends up with most of the main characters dead.
At the end of the Viking era, most of them settled down to a more boring, respectable life. But their dreams remained, and occasionally manifest themselves in ultra-dark crime movies – or stories like The Northman.
If you’re equally nostalgic for the days of Canute, Ragnar Lothbrok and the notorious Ivar the Boneless, this one’s for you. But bring a warm blanket.
