I remember coming out of Robert Eggers’ last film, The Lighthouse, with an odd reaction. I didn’t love that movie the way I loved his first film, The Witch. It felt a little too much like the bit overtook the film. It was all sizzle AND steak but somehow no meal. However, I came out of the movie even more excited for what he’d do next. In a way, he’d gotten all the hard stuff out of the way. He proved he could nail tone. He could get visceral reactions out of an audience. He knew how to get really wild and interesting performances out of actors: really established actors who didn’t have to listen to him. He even showed an ability to scale up. The Lighthouse definitely felt more expensive than The Witch yet it still looked like he got ever last dollar of that budget onscreen. The only thing left for him was to get a bigger budget and more of a story board.
That’s exactly what The Northman is. This is the exact movie I’d hoped Eggers would follow up The Lighthouse with. He’s telling the story that Hamlet is based on. A young Viking prince sees his father get killed by his uncle, disappears for several years while dreaming of revenge, then returns to get that revenge. It’s still simple enough for Eggers to add all his flourishes but structured enough that it isn’t wallowing in them. The budget is about 7-8x The Lighthouse, but it still looks much more expensive than it is. This film has no business costing less than $100 million and makes me wonder what all these blockbuster directors are doing. While I still prefer The Witch, mainly due to genre preference, The Northman is the exact movie I wanted it to be.
Alexander Skarsgard plays the grown prince Amleth. Sure. He is a tad old for the role. I’d really prefer someone closer to 30 or younger. It’s especially weird since his mother in this, Nicole Kidman, played his wife in Big Little Lies*. Skarsgard otherwise works for the role. He’s Swedish and can get very ripped. Anya Taylor-Joy plays his Slavic sorceress love interest. It’s a fun use of her kind of crazy genealogy. She’s not ethnically ambiguous in the Ben Kingsley way. Instead, you can put her in anything as someone who isn’t from here, wherever “here” may be. It’s nice seeing her reteam with Eggers. Same with Willem Dafoe, who brings a lot of his Lighthouse willingness to go weird to this. Ethan Hawke is game too. This is a movie filled with actors getting really weird, and I’m all for it. This isn’t a movie about people trying to act like people. Eggers is so good at establishing a world and getting performances to match that very unsettling or irregular world. The Northman isn’t an accurate account of Scandinavian kingdoms. It’s more like an accurate account of what the Viking folklore would’ve sounded like around a campfire.
*Before anyone gets too deep into ageism in Hollywood in this, let’s point out a couple things. Kidman was likely cast to match Ethan Hawke as her husband early on. She is 9 years older than Skarsgard which helps split the difference. She’s too old to be his young mother and too young to be his old mother. If we also add in that Skarsgard really should be younger in this film, then it all feels less egregious. That’s not to say there isn’t ageism in Hollywood. There definitely is. This just isn’t the case I’d build my argument around.
I don’t have any real complaints about the movie. It’s a hair long perhaps, but what isn’t these days? I love that someone gave Robert Eggers a budget to make a Robert Eggers movie. The Northman is the final film I needed to believe he can go in whatever direction he wants. Continuing with highly stylized genre seems most likely, but I’d also be curious to see his toned-down prestige play or see what he could do with a major franchise. And before you complain about the idea of a Disney or Universal defanging him by throwing him into their machine, I’d like to point to Dennis Villeneuve as exhibit A. Anyway, The Northman is good.
Verdict: Strongly Recommend
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