So-So Saga

Alexander Skarsgård has a fever, and the only prescription is more revenge in Robert Eggers' latest take on gothic history, The Northman, co-written by novelist and songwriter Sjón and produced by Skarsgård and Eggers. The film is loosely based on the Icelandic saga of a legendary medieval hero named Amleth, the murder of whose father and the bloody revenge upon whose uncle served as the template for Shakespeare's Hamlet.

It's the broad strokes and archetypes of the legendary hero that ultimately serve as the conceptual foundation of Eggers' film, more so than, say, the supposed historical fidelity for which he has become ironically infamous. The project certainly provides another signature opportunity for Eggers to stress his commitment to period accuracy in dialogue, production design, and music, previously demonstrated in his debut, the colonial horror film The Witch, as well as its follow-up, the darkly romantic black comedy The Lighthouse. But there's no mistaking the just as, if not more apparent rooting of The Northman in modern traditions of international pop culture, be they the mythopoeic worlds of Conan or the samurai epics of post-war Japan. It is the narrative juvenility of the latter aspects of the film that point up the pretenses of the director's signature approach, and renders The Northman both Eggers' most emblematic and uneven film to date.

Our story goes like this: It's the late-9th century, and on some God-forsaken fictional island in Scandinavia, the war-ravaged King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke) has decided the time is right for his son Amleth (Oscar Novak) to be made a man, prepared to carry on his royal bloodline and test his mettle nobly so that he might attain the Northman's ultimate dream, to die in combat and be taken up by the Valkyrie to Valhalla. With the assistance of the court fool and shaman Heimir (Willem Dafoe), Aurvandill and little Amleth imbibe hallucinogens and descend into an animalistic trance, Aurvandill swearing his son to take revenge on anyone who should take his father's life. Sure enough, Aurvandill falls the next morning by the sword of his own brother, Fjölnir (Claes Bang), and Amleth flees.

Fast-forward many years, and the older Amleth, played by Skarsgård, has been taken in and raised by a band of Vikings. After one of their raids pillaging bounty and slaves from the Slavic settlements along the river-routes from the Baltic, Amleth is commended by his chief for his iron heart, a praise that, ironically, seems to conjure doubts in the wolf-warrior's mind. He encounters a Seeress played by Björk, who reminds him of his blood oath. Learning that a shipment of chattel just captured is bound for a settlement in Iceland where the exiled Fjölnir now resides, Amleth brands himself with the mark of a slave and secrets himself aboard a boat. Along his journey, Amleth will fall in love with an alleged sorceress played by Anya Taylor-Joy, undergo a couple more trances, do mind-combat with an undead warrior for possession of his really boss sword, and play a couple innings of what I can only describe as a gladiatorial precursor to both cricket and rugby. And he will, above and after it all, be faced with making a choice foretold since his father swore him to his blood oath as a boy, between the path led by love for his kin, and the path led by hatred for his enemies.

The Northman is a movie that very much dances a fine line between elaborately and operatically portraying the spiritual worldviews of its characters, and then suggesting that the film is, after all, a work of fantasy-adventure. Eggers' films are often praised for the depths of research to which he and his collaborators go to not only construct a historical piece, but to deeply immerse the spectator in a sense that they have been sent back in time to be with characters whose conceptions of not only values, but also the metaphysical nature of reality itself, is often lost upon them. But, at the end of the day, to praise historical accuracy in the costume drama rests on the same confidence game as the attempt to create it. History is not a construct only, or even mostly, of what we know for sure, but also, and mostly, of what we believe with empirical confidence to be true. Then there's also what we don't really know, but we can use circumstantial clues to speculate about. And then, finally, there's that black pit of deep time where we know enough to know that we have very little to go on, indeed. It is not a confidence in the veracity of Eggers' research that undergirds his films. It could all be eccentric obscurantism, the detail-orientation being its own minute, but sometimes alienating form of pleasant spectacle. But it is, rather, the strange, ingenious experience this collision of known and unknown creates, the allegation of history itself opening the door to a fairly unpredictable fantasy unto itself, that is the point. In this regard, The Northman ends up being Eggers' most ambitious production to date, for reasons having nothing to do with its budget, which is multiple times that of either The Witch or The Lighthouse.

The musicality of the film is especially important to its overall success. The original score by Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough acts as a droning, hypnotic compliment to the way the characters vibrate between the physical world they know and the super-nature of gods and spirits. There is also, just as much as a fantasy-adventure quality, also a musical quality to The Northman, albeit with its war-dances and rituals transformed into kinds of corrupted, alien musical numbers. Forgetting anything to do with the specifics of dialogue and costume, it is the primal layering of sound in The Northman that is its most emotionally and sensually convincing aspect.

At the same time, the most enduring sequence in the movie -- that gladiatorial sports scene I couldn't find a more elegant way to describe -- proves definitive of the reverse tendency of the film, its sweeping expressionistic fantasy counterbalanced in the extreme by a non-picturesque naturalism. We are used to seeing movies in which kings and queens put on their best toilette and sally forth with a pageant of their noble warriors, attachés, and servants. We are not so much used to the destination Eggers and Sjón reach, which is fairly removed from the formula portrayal of either medieval sports or stereotypes about so-called "Viking culture." In contrast to the highly choreographed, controlled chaos of the battle and raid sequences, this scene of abject bloodsport is portrayed as haphazard and unromantic. There is an airy, affectless quality to the scene and scenes like it that serve as a polar contrast to the film's much more frequent - and, frankly, less narratively inspired - Wagnerian dalliances into fantasy. And this is a tension between notes, at once charming and completely frustrating, that runs throughout The Northman.

Determined to both immerse the spectator within a world of grotesque and uncanny experience, while also keeping them at a psychological distance, The Northman is certainly not some "hoo-rah" warrior flick. Though extensive overall, the most lurid violence of the film is often viewed from a distance itself, or else implied just off-screen. Though building to a final, spectacular showdown, it is in moments of even more bizarre and disquieting naturalism-by-contrast that Eggers effectively eschews the notion that his story is a power-fantasy, as opposed to a montage of the grotesque. He sets us adrift in the barbaric nightmare world of violence, sacrifice, slavery, and death-worship that is Amleth. In so doing, he evokes an uncomfortable and sympathetic pity not only for what he has been made into by the loss of his father, but also for what he has been bred into by the very world into which his father ensnared him. Like a solid outlaw-warrior anti-hero, his stumbling progress proves a fascinating blur of the monstrous and the naive, the diabolical and the innocent.

The problem becomes that even Eggers' detail-oriented approach, in the context of a "Viking movie," betrays a very limited imagination when it comes to developing character and narrative. With The Witch, Eggers joined a rogues gallery of independent filmmakers whose low-budget genre movies mixed conventions with the arthouse, striking a cultural middlebrow that remains consistently popular among a certain generation of cinephiles. With The Northman, he reaches a new peak of being able to imprint his idiosyncratic vision upon a conventional genre, but also stumbles with a more uneven stride, doing very much to ingeniously exploit alien details of history and culture, but not very much to connect these details to different dimensions of human experience and expression. Regardless of whether or not I am in the right position to speak on the film's historical accuracy, I feel confident in describing The Northman as an aesthetically exemplary demonstration of a terribly dry and "textbook" Viking movie. I can not tell a lie and say that I have seen the operatic fringes of Scandinavian warrior culture and mythology rendered much more awe-inspiringly than in The Northman. I can, however, say in good faith that there remains both an alienating cynicism and a boring juvenility to the demonstration itself. This is an adaptation of the outlaw warrior saga that takes for granted its cold, relative absence of very much to do with subjective experience, and thus renders the emotional dimensions of its drama as largely limited between the cold and affectless on the one hand, and the luxuriously mad and morbidly gleeful on the other. For all its conceptual ingenuity, the film lurches emotionally into the tiresome formula of depicting late antiquity as riven with hate, tribalism, and bloodlust in not only deed, but very thought. It's myopic in its purview of the potential for storytelling within even an archetypal fantasy-adventure, while also overly academic in terms of how it attempts to paper over, or perhaps rationalize away, the emotional vacuum it creates between itself and the spectator.

The cynicism of The Northman isn't nearly so apparent or pretentious as it is in its most recent kind of middlebrow genre-arthouse antecedent, which was David Lowery's The Green Knight. They are both, however, very much of a kind in terms of both their spectacular indulgences, and the veritably neurotic means by which the filmmakers approach the mapping of the values and worldview in their antiquated characters. Like The Green Knight, the medieval times of The Northman are a hollow of the macabre and the perverse. Fables of fortune and patriotic parables are transformed by our disenchanted generation of film school brats into soulless horror stories, their fantasies of history haunted by the most superficial and vulgar details.

By contrast, Nils Gaup and Ravn Lanesskog's The Last King from 2016, taking place in the Christianized 13th-century of Norway, rather than the pagan 9th-century of Denmark, may not be very exceptional from a technical standpoint, but nonetheless shocks the spectator weaned on formulas of antiquarian barbarism with its own far more disciplined dramatization of historical details. Whereas Skarsgård's Amleth is the spitting image of a very American kind of action movie warrior (the Conan variant), the historical heroes of The Last King engage not only in brutal combat, but also in delicate dances of strategy, of flight and hiding, of care and complication. The sporting excursions of The Northman are quite something, but they're nothing compared to Gaup's unobtrusive depiction of the Birkebeiner warriors skiing down slopes and across miles of snow-swept mountains. Nor does all the gravitas in the depictions of music and ritual, sex and sacrifice in The Northman really compare to the intimacy and quiet of a scene in The Last King in which two hardened warriors tenderly nurture a small baby.

It's certainly not surprising that so many American films turn out to basically fall into Orientalizing stereotypes when it comes to Eastern Europe in deep time, just as it's not surprising that the dances of war and death in which Amleth takes part conjure up corollary tropes of Indian raids and the noble savage across the Atlantic, centuries away. Besides neuroses about the capacity and potential of humanity to exist fully, emotionally, and non-horrifically, without the dependence on modern trappings, movies like The Northman are also ultimately opportunities to vicariously play the savage, to confirm presuppositions about the apparent nature of humanity in its most reductive, animalized sense. In the case of The Last King, it's certainly not a great film, but how it chooses to fill in the blanks of the historical record, with possible melodramatic scenarios and feelings, rather than with trinkets of rune and verse, proves to have at least as much, if not more emotional and, in the textbook sense, intellectual substance. The realm of The Last King is one in which, like all stages of history, its participants are on the precipice of constant flux, traversing a moving divide between past and future. Hence, its characters do not act as the characters of The Northman act, which is as if they are trapped within the inescapable thrall of only one way of thinking, of only one way of being, which is always insanely. Eggers and Sjón's fantasy-adventure turns out to be, if understandably un-adventurous, then also surprisingly lacking in the fantastic. Its imagination is too blinkered by a totalizing obsession with only certain kinds of theatrical details, which are conflated with character and historical actor itself. Its operatic surges pack quite a punch, but the bruising it leaves behind is surprisingly light in complexion. That's the aftermath of a lot of bluster, but little juice. That's what comes from a rear-facing view that is so static, so infinitely regressive into the primal, rather than meditative of the ceaseless moment of history and human beings as the thinking, feeling, nuanced actors within it. You can't rock someone's foundation in the nature of mankind if the husk has no spirit in the first place. You can't wound a dead thing.