The Northman Review

This one is gonna be long and meandering, so get ready.

Robert Eggers might be my favorite contemporary filmmaker. There is competition, of course – Celine Sciamma or Bong Joon-ho could easily take his place when I actually sit down and go through their filmography, Taika Waititi never fails to charm my socks off, Paul Thomas Anderson is an indisputable master of the art form, and Julia Ducournau is lurking in the shadows, waiting to take her place in the competition depending on whatever she comes out with after the masterpiece that was Titane, but despite a very small number of films to bring to the table, Robert Eggers’ entire filmography up to this point rests on my personal top films list. Both The Witch and The Lighthouse have effectively wormed their way into my personal canon, helping to define my taste in the art form. So to say I went into The Northman with high expectations would be an understatement, and right off the bat my feelings towards this film are complicated because as much good as I could say about it, it is the first Robert Eggers film that doesn’t feel like it was explicitly catered to my taste. I don’t mean to say that this film is bad – far from it, it’s fantastic – or that I feel any personal entitlement to his work, only that my thoughts on it are complicated.

The thing is that I just don’t really find revenge epics all that interesting, particularly the darker, grittier, more subversive types like this one. For all of its grand scale, the actual message behind The Northman initially came off as very simple and all too familiar for me. I’ve sat through plenty of grim, brutal historical dramas that stretch out the runtime only to explain that a life spent in pursuit of revenge is a bad thing, actually. It may be because I’m not particularly a wrathful type, but this sort of message doesn’t really resonate with me all that much, and when I saw The Northman’s twist and ending coming from a mile away, I started to feel a little bit underwhelmed.

At the same time, though everything else about The Northman is impeccable in a way that only Robert Eggers can really pull off. Eggers has a habit of making films that leave me befuddled upon first viewing, but lodge in my brain for days later as they slowly grow on me. They’re difficult films to penetrate, and though The Northman is his most accessible yet it is no exception. At the same time, there’s always something about them that leaves you captivated long after the credits roll, and the more they stick with you, the more you come to enjoy them. The Northman may be my least favorite by him, but it is no exception to this rule. It is, quite simply, a stellar feat of filmmaking.

The Northman reads to me like Robert Eggers was finally given a high budget and told to go nuts, and go nuts he absolutely did. The special effects work here is a massive step up in scope and visual quality than the scuzzy low-fi thrills of The Lighthouse, and it’s every bit as fun to watch as you’d expect. But it’s not just that the CGI or practical effects are good here – the set and costume designs are absolutely sublime, and the cinematography and camerawork feels every bit as intentional and calculated to craft the perfect atmosphere as any of Eggers’ previous works. There’s one scene in particular that absolutely stunned me; a Viking raid on a village that starts off almost over-the-top in its choreography to the point that it’s almost fun before gradually growing more and more horrifying as the Vikings move on from soldiers and guards to slaughtering innocent civilians, rounding up women and children and even drinking blood from the corpses of the slain. All of this is presented in a single unbroken take that’s simultaneously incredibly impressively choreographed while also remaining very slow and static, showcasing the horrific violence of Viking culture in the banality of daily existence. This is a story about the personal and cultural effects of living a life of violence, and that’s something that’s every bit as mundane as it is grim.

One of the most immediately stunning things to me about The Witch was just how intricate its period recreations were. I’m not a historian and can’t speak to historical accuracy, but Eggers has a talent for digging far deeper into the essence of the time and place in which he sets his films than most, if not all, of his contemporaries. The Northman is no exception. Already being hailed as one of the most historically accurate pieces of Viking media ever produced, The Northman isn’t content to simply reproduce the aesthetics of Norse culture for contemporary audiences; it feels at its core like a Norse story. The dialogue, the motivations and the themes are all things that seem central to the culture it’s trying to replicate, and there’s a real attempt to grapple with the realities of what these people actually believed, how they thought, and how they lived in their day to day lives. Even the more mythical, supernatural elements are steeped in imagery and symbolic meaning that is unmistakably Norse. This gives The Northman an incredibly textured and authentic atmosphere that sets it apart from… pretty much any other period piece you could see these days. I don’t know where Robert Eggers got his time machine from, but I hope he never stops using it.

Thinking about this is when The Northman finally clicked for me. At first, I couldn’t help but compare it to 2015’s The Revenant, a film that is similarly long, bleak and brutal with similar ideas about the cycle of revenge that it plays rather simplistically in spite of the scope of its production. The Revenant is a film that looks incredible and often feels incredible, but is ultimately hollow when you really dig into it. The main difference between these two films is that The Northman is far from hollow. It has more to say than I’ve given it credit for so far; as I’m writing this review, I’m pondering its ideas about fate and agency, about the measure of men and lords, about the differences – or lack thereof – between a man and a beast. It may feel familiar on the surface, but at its core it is a far more gnarly and less modern story than anything we might expect from Hollywood.

I didn’t realize until afterwards that The Northman is an adaptation of a true story; the legend of Amleth, a Viking prince who sought to avenge his father’s murder at the hand of his uncle, as told by the third and fourth volumes of the Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus. This is the story that directly inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which essentially means that when I say I feel like I’ve seen this story before I absolutely have, as it is thusly a fundamental keystone of Western storytelling. Does The Northman stand up to that legacy? I don’t know and I don’t care; I have no interest in comparing the quality of a film that just released this week to that of a century’s old legend that influenced an unspeakably large portion of the Western canon. What I am interested in is comparing it to 2021’s The Green Knight, a similarly atmospheric and mysterious adaptation of an equally important medieval story. There are tons of differences between the two; for starters, The Green Knight is more magical and emotional, The Northman far bleaker and more gruesome, but they fit comfortably alongside each other because of the dedication with which they craft the atmospheres of their source material and the accompanying time periods, and the way in which they try to truly grapple with the values and cultures of their source material rather than simply modernize the story and throw a medieval coat of paint on top. Anyone who knows how much I adored The Green Knight should know that this is very high praise.

The Northman is a film created and viewed by modern individuals, but we are never asked to weight its protagonist’s actions through the lens of contemporary values. Instead, we are simply invited to view him as he is; a man in a time very different from ours, bound and animated by forces he will never truly have agency over. A tragic hero in a very Shakespearean sense, but viewed through a more arthouse sensibility. This approach is utterly fascinating to me.

This has been a long, rambly and meandering review of a film that I have many complicated thoughts about. This may be almost impossible to read for anyone else but me, but I’m okay with that. I don’t think I can really do this film justice through a normal review format, and I’m not particularly interested in trying. I instead wanted to convey just how much this film has been living rent-free in my head despite being unsure about it at first, and just how much I’ve come to appreciate it. Robert Eggers is an incredible filmmaking talent that stubbornly refuses to make films that cater to modern sensibilities, instead creating weird, abstract takes on various different legends, genres and time periods that aren’t really like anything else out there. I don’t know if I’ll be revisiting The Northman as much as I have his previous work, but at the same time I’m already thinking of revisiting it this weekend. We’re incredibly lucky to have Eggers in the film industry today, and I hope he never stops doing what he’s doing.