Movie review: The Northman (2022)

By the time that Shakespeare's masterpiece begins, Hamlet, the Viking prince has lost his father, the king, at the hands of his uncle who then marries his mother. There are strong signs that the play was based on a real life historical saga, which is lost to history, but it is believed to have come from Iceland around 900 CE.

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The movie The Northman, tries to reconstruct that lost Viking story. It is a story of burly men raising drinking horns to their conquests in fire-lit grass-thatched mansions, half-naked warriors aboard ancient ships on their way to raid and pillage, men in a murderous frenzy looking for magic swords, and fighting to their death. This is not the sanitised, horned-helmet-wearing, Marvel comics Thor vision of Viking-hood. This is blood and mud and ice and pagan gods.

The film starts with young Prince Amleth (Oscar Novak) when his father Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) returns from plundering the English Coast. The fight was hard, and the king has a nasty sword wound that has him thinking about his mortality. Against the objections of his mother Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), Aurvandil decides to initiate Amleth into manhood, so he can be prepared to take his place on the throne if and when the king dies.

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The ceremony, in which the father and son ingest a psychedelic tea brewed by the shaman/fool Heimir (a gloriously crazed Willem Dafoe), is the first taste of just how bonkers this movie is going to get.

As they are leaving the ceremony, the king is ambushed by his brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang), and young Amleth escapes by sea.

Years later, Amleth has grown into the extremely healthy form of Alexander Skarsgard, whose ab muscles ripple from pulling longboat oars.

He’s pillaging with a band of berserkers operating in the land of the Kievan Rus, which is now known as Ukraine. There, he meets a seeress (Björk) who tells him Fjölnir almost immediately lost his kingdom and fled to Iceland, where he has set up a new settlement with Gudrún at his side.

Amleth stows away on a ship bound for Iceland disguised as a slave, and meets the gloriously named Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy), a Slavic sorceress who pledges to help him seek revenge in return for her freedom.

Alexander Skarsgard and Anya Taylor-Joy plot revenge.

Eggers (the director) creates worlds that follow the mythology of their inhabitants while also offering sly comments on said mythology.