137 min | R | April 22, 2022 | Focus Features
A prince watches his father murdered and his mother taken. He spends years turning himself into a weapon, then walks into the volcano-lit dark to collect the blood debt. Revenge has rarely looked this filthy or felt this inevitable.
Amleth is a Norse prince who witnesses his uncle slaughter his father and seize his mother. He flees as a boy and returns as a beast. By the time he tracks Fjölnir to a sheep farm in Iceland, he has buried his own humanity under muscle and ritual. The Northman is a Viking revenge saga, but it is really about the cost of a single vow swallowing an entire life. The film treats prophecy and fate as a cage the hero builds for himself and then refuses to leave.
Alexander Skarsgård plays Amleth as a body before a man. He moves through the raids on all fours, snarls like the wolves he imitates, and lets the dialogue thin out so the violence can speak. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Olga of the Birch Forest with cunning rather than tenderness, a slave who weaponizes superstition to survive. Nicole Kidman plays Queen Gudrún and detonates the film’s central assumption in a single scene where she drops the grieving-mother mask. Claes Bang gives Fjölnir a weary domesticity that makes him harder to hate than the revenge plot wants him to be. Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe bookend the early ritual scenes with theatrical menace.
Robert Eggers directs from a script he wrote with the Icelandic poet Sjón, and he shoots the carnage in long unbroken takes that refuse to cut away. The village raid plays as one continuous prowl through fire and slaughter, the camera gliding from killing to killing without the relief of an edit. Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography drains the color toward ash and mud and saves its saturation for blood and firelight. The sound design builds from drums and breath and chant rather than orchestral swell. The climactic duel happens on the slope of an erupting volcano, and the production design earns that operatic excess by grounding every preceding frame in dirt.
The Northman commits to its own brutality with a discipline that most epics lack. Eggers never blinks and never apologizes, and that refusal is the point. The film asks whether a man who exists only to kill can ever stop, and it answers honestly. Amleth is magnificent and hollow, and the movie knows the difference even when he does not.