In a number of ways, most especially in terms of budget, The Northman is Robert Eggers’ most ambitious film so far. And in the sets, the sprawling locations, the visual effects and the deep bench of notable actors, that financial ambition is up there on the screen. Yet there remains the impression that all of that money has had a tempering influence. The Northman might have some fantastically evocative character names (Fjölnir the Brotherless, King Aurvandil War-Raven, Olga of the Birch Forest) but it never gives itself over to the otherworldly lunacy lurking within in the way The Lighthouse did. It flirts with madness but remains in the mainstream.
Of course, that’s only in relation to Egger’s earlier work. By comparison to other megaplex fare, The Northman has unnerving, bad trip psychedelia to spare. Bodies float in smoky chambers and the voices of eyeless seers reverberate in our very skulls. Men like Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) pursue their worldly aims—like avenging the murder of his father (Ethan Hawke) and the kidnapping of his mother (Nicole Kidman) at the hands of his uncle (Claes Bang)—but they do so at the whim of gods and demons.
Yet Eggers, as usual, grounds the supernatural in the empirical. The Northman may be full of dark mysticism but it’s irrevocably entwined with Amleth’s world of mud, blood and iron. There’s a reason that blind oracle (Björk) calls what she does her “earth magic.”
The Lighthouse was told in vivid black and white and The Northman is in color. But’s not a 180 degree turn for Eggers. This is a world of gray skies and muted, worn garments but Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography does not belong to the dark-therefore-serious school of 21st century aesthetics. Color is used sparingly but gorgeously, as when rivers of lava begin to open viscous, orange wounds in the terra.
There’s a pushback, in certain spheres of cinephilia, against movies that are cool as fuck for the sake of being cool as fuck. This is a wrongheaded form of classicism that seeks to exclude from the discourse the very type of filmmaking that will likely, in the future, be seen as representative of this era’s taste. The Northman is certainly “badass” (or maybe just super metal, once you take the thrillingly percussive score into account) in a way that may seem superficial but that says more about the aesthetic values of the present day than most of the bland and visually undeveloped stuff that tops the box office.
And yet there is a nagging blandness, an expectedness, at the core of The Northman. Perhaps it’s simply that the formula of the revenge movie is too hard to shake. Even though Eggers tries to interrogate the subgenre–using his knack for creating versions of our world that are still somehow alien to question whether, by the rules of this society, the man who so wronged Amleth and his family may actually be more just–the film becomes less interesting the more it succumbs to the necessities of its plot. It’s better than most of the current movies in its weight class but it’s less than that of which we know Eggers is capable.
