The Northman

 Everything about The Northman is supersized: the muscles, the action, the budget, and for filmmaker Robert Eggers, the stakes. The Norse epic represents a significant step up onto the worlds stage for a director previously responsible for niche little indie genre flicks, decent hits in and of themselves, but free of the expectations a near $100 million budget will bring. The last ten years have seen many indie breakouts like Eggers suddenly catapulted to box office juggernaut status off the back of just one or two films (Colin Trevorrow, Taika Waititi, Etc) and almost all have lost their creative soul in the process, delivering branded content (TM) studio noted to unintelligible blandness. The supersized risk of The Northman lies in how much it feels like an Eggers film, only bigger.

An Eggers film, for those uninitiated, means a semi-mythic period piece dripping with exhaustively researched historical detail, down to the tiniest, grimiest piece of fastidious production design. His debut was 2015’s  low-key, paranoid horror The Witch, the tale of a 1630’s puritan family menaced by satanic forces, as well as their own dogmatic lifestyle. It gained a quick cult following due to some uncommonly handsome visuals and a breakout performance from Anya Taylor-Joy, as the family’s daughter whose paranormal liberation forms the feminist backbone of the films neatly packaged allegory. Taylor-Joy’s star-is-born performance was notable for the actresses effortless magnetism and her command of the 15^th century English dialect Eggers had the whole cast use, a trick that gave the movie a culturally sticky memeability and marked the director as having an auteurist trademark.

Eggers doubled and tripled down on that trademark for The Lighthouse (2019), having co-leads Robert Pattinson and Willem Defoe barking and slurring 1890’s period appropriate lines that became instant internet obsessions and all time meme material. Obsessive historical research is in every line and every frame of The Lighthouse, ironically taking it out of the realm of verisimilitude and into a kind of hyper-stylisation that is both highly comedic and impressively grand. It is a richer, deeper film than The Witch, leveraging a stripped down, two-men-one-location set up into meditations on personal psychology, male-male relationships, mythology and capitalism, while also containing a couple of fart jokes.

It's amazing how much of Eggers now trademark style has found its way into the much more expensive Northman. The fart jokes are still present, as is the stylized period dialect, detailed production design, and the deft weaving of magic and myth into an earthy, tactile world. Perhaps Eggers’ best skill is understanding how our ancestors perception of the world would differ from ours, in terms of being more open to magical or spiritual causes of unexplainable phenomena. A puritan settler would of course blame a witch for his crops failing, as would a Viking marauder look upon the northern lights and think them the work of gods.    

Amongst Viking marauders is where we find ourselves in the opening of The Northman, as a warrior-king (Ethan Hawke) returns from battle to his wife (Nicole Kidman) and young son Amleth. These early scenes are promising, with Hawke comfortably embodying paternal warmth and Eggers indulging in a psychedelic and fart filled father son bonding experience that squarely fits the film into his oeuvre. The good times cant last though; the king is quickly betrayed and killed by his seemingly evil brother (Claes Bang), who kidnaps the queen and leaves young Amleth for dead.

By the time a ripped Alexander Skarsgård appears as the grown up Amleth fixated on bloody vengeance, it’s clear we’re doing Hamlet (the clue is in the protagonists name), or more accurately the old Norse poem Shakespeare’s play is based on. That’s not necessarily a problem; Hamlet’s obviously a good story, oft retold and reworked, but this is where the films blockbuster concessions begin to appear. In order to make his style plateable for a mass audience, Eggers has had to weld it to a narrative that is disappointingly simplified. The internal complexity of Shakespeare’s characters is gone, replaced by a lot of guttural shouting and trite comments on the nature of vengeance. The thematic richness of The Lighthouse or even The Witch is gone, deemed unmarketable by a system of studio notes Eggers has publicly voiced frustration with.

The trade-off for narrative simplicity is big budget spectacle, and this is where Eggers is a lot more successful in supersizing his aesthetic. The frequent action scenes that punctuate the film are impressively staged, bloody, brutal, and visceral. Skarsgård throws himself into these sequences with unrestrained macho fury, contorting his absurdly muscled body like a wild animal, tearing into man, beast, even supernatural entity with exhilarating force.

Skarsgård gives the showy, physically committed performance, but there’s good work elsewhere from Kidman and Bang, who find depth in roles that are underwritten on the page, and Bjork, who returns to the big screen for the first time in two decades as a seeress who guides Amleth towards his vengeful destiny, a role the pop star has no trouble sinking  her teeth into. Anya Taylor-Joy returns to the Eggers-verse as Amleth’s love interest Olga, a captured slave with the beginnings of spiritual powers. It’s a character that should mesh well with Skarsgård’s, complicating his motivations and adding a tangential perspective, but despite a confident, striking performance from Taylor-Joy, Olga falls victim to more narrative simplifying, turning her into an accessory to Amleth’s journey, and a vessel for his bloodline, icky stuff.

Despite the shortcomings though, I find myself rooting for The Northman to succeed; it’s dumb, but almost all films of this size are dumb nowadays, and Eggers has done a more than admirable job translating his specific set of visual idiosyncrasies to a large scale action movie that looks and feels a lot more engaging than then the majority of its peers. Whether or not the risk will pay off financially, only time will tell, but I hope The Northman proves that personal visions can still be sold at the multiplex.