Emotion, superstition and revenge

The Northman Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang Director: Robert Eggers Duration: 2 h 16 m The Northman is playing in theatres

The best thing about being a Robert Eggers fan is it’s so easy to be a completist. Confine yourself to his features and you’re up to date in three. In 2015 The Witch: A New-england Folktale made a name both for the director and his star, Anya Taylor-joy. The year 2019 brought The Lighthouse, a very different tale of superstition and dread. And now The Northman.

Eggers leaps through history like a time-travelling kangaroo. The Witch was set in the 1630s. The Lighthouse stayed in roughly the same place but jumped forward a quarter millennium to the late 1800s. Now, he’s set the clock back a thousand years, to AD 895. We’re still on the North Atlantic, by the way — just the other side.

This is the story of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), a king-in-waiting whose uncle murders the prince’s father and then marries the man’s widow.

Now, before you go accusing Eggers and his Icelandic co-writer Sjón of moving one letter and remaking Hamlet, know that William Shakespeare was cribbing heavily from the original Scandinavian epic as set down by Saxo Grammaticus in the 12th

century. So much for “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

After young Amleth witnesses the death of his father at his uncle’s hand, he runs away to sea with a simple, frightening mantra: “I will avenge you father. I will save you mother. I will kill you Fjölnir.” That would be Fjölnir the Brotherless (well, he’s brotherless now), as played by Denmark’s Claes Bang. Mother is Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman). And father is — or rather was — King Aurvendil War-raven, played by Ethan Hawke.

Time passes, and Amleth grows up to be played by Skarsgård, different enough in appearance from his younger self that he can pass as a random foreign slave in his uncle’s retinue, there to plot his payback. In The Northman, vengeance is a dish best served cold. And slow. In fact, pacing is the film’s main problem. I appreciated the story immensely by the end, but in the early going I kept being reminded of The Green Knight, a recent Medieval adventure film that nearly sinks under the weight of too much atmosphere, not enough plot. Stick with it and Eggers gradually rights this longboat to an enjoyable even keel, though I’d argue that cutting down the 136-minute runtime (versus 92 and 109 for his first two features), would have been a better choice.

There are some lovely pre-shakespearean touches, such as the film’s trio of witches, scattered through the story rather than appearing all at once. The first is Willem Dafoe as Heimir the Fool, a combination jester and shaman. Björk shows up as Seeress, while Ingvar Sigurdsson plays He-witch, telling Amleth: “You must choose between kindness for your kin or hate for your enemies.”

That’s going to prove a complicated conundrum, especially after Amleth saves his half-brother from what looks to be a first-millennium version of what I’m calling Death Quidditch, with extra bludgers and beaters. Of course, this also puts him in good stead with his uncle.

And it reinforces the era as one of sudden, ruthless cruelty, the sort of society where a battle’s winners took what they wanted, while the losers, if they even survived, had to go through life with names like Finnr the Nosestub.

Taylor-joy reunites with Eggers to play Olga of the Birch Forest, a fellow captive with her own vendetta against Fjölnir. She also harbours feelings for Amleth, though her romantic aspirations are nothing if not practical. She’s no Ophelia.

The Northman (like Eggers’ other tales), hinges on emotion and superstition. It is set in a time when the mere threat of magic might infect a man’s mind, making him react to things that might not have manifested without that creative, suggestive force. A thousand odd years in the future, at the movies at least, that power still holds sway. ★★★