The Northman

There are some films where you don’t just get entertainment, you get an ‘experience.’ Sometimes you can even hold on the entertaining part. They can immerse you, rattle you and leave you feeling like you’ve endured something. The Northman certainly fits within this bracket.

This is no casual Viking action film. Prepare for a little bit of dog murder, multiple horse beheadings, a barn full of children being burned alive, mother snogging and your protagonist killing a man with his head. You’ll witness psychedelic mystical scenes, rather a lot of naked fighting (impractical surely?!) and even a Willem Dafoe preserved shrunken head.

Robert Eggers perfectly blends the arthouse and the mainstream in this epic morality tale of revenge; nigh-on Shakespearean in scope. It’s fairly heavy-going, lots of 300-esque grunting and sweaty abs, but the experience is a visceral one rather than the violence. This isn’t a film going for shock tactics, it brings you into its world and absorbs you into it.

Its lack of a light touch can hurt in a story like this, it certainly won’t be for everyone. The language veers just about on the right side of the olde worlde fantasy/modern divide but can be a little self-serious and hard to discern in parts. It’s also bleak and unrelenting, taking our hero Amleth through the ringer on his path to avenging his father’s death at the hands of his uncle (yes, this Nordic tale is the one which loosely inspired Hamlet and, subsequently, The Lion King.)

This lifetime-spanning story truly feels epic. Perhaps not quite as self-contained and disturbing as Eggers’ previous film The Lighthouse, but it's a flexing of the muscles after that masterpiece in more ways than one. It’s simply jaw-droppingly beautiful, both in location and cinematography. The Icelandic landscape, combined with picture-perfect shot work, incredible colour changes and long takes taking us across scenes from left to right makes it an artistic wonder, matched by an intense, haunting and bruising soundtrack.

The impeccable cast are all on top form as well, even those with less screen time than you’d perhaps expect. They seem to be all in on the style and the concept but Alexander Skarsgard is particularly animalistic as Amleth in a performance surely destined for awards-contention. Like DiCaprio in the Revenant, Skarsgard doesn’t get a huge amount of dialogue but does so much with grunts, barks, howls and stares. It’s truly transformative in parts.

It's a properly intense film, done right on all counts. To this writer, The Lighthouse just pips it despite the size of this story and the undoubted quality on show but it’s a remarkable film that stands out vividly in a market of franchises and remakes.

5 stars *****