Critics reviews

What Eggers has delivered is a relatively epic and unsurprisingly ambitious exercise that’s loaded with some tremendous imagery, his trademark detail, and grisly violence, yet somehow feels unduly restrained.

The Northman is an unapologetic, non-stop adventure that dispenses everything, everywhere, all at once. From Icelandic family sagas to Norse legends to supernatural myths, Eggers plays with the rich material at his disposal with a wide-eyed enthusiasm that’s both disarming and awe-inspiring.

For the most part [The Northman is] an enthralling immersion in a forbidding time and place, enhanced by an immoderately attractive cast and saddled only by a dramatic sameness that settles in after a while and gradually diminishes the film’s impact.

The Northman is by far Eggers' biggest film in both scope and budget, and it looks it: a sprawling summit-of-the-gods epic shot through with rich, hallucinatory set pieces, and movie stars in wild Pagan wiggery.

To say [Eggers has] stepped it up a notch would be an understatement — the man’s smashed it right out of the park... This is intimate, culturally rich storytelling on a brutally epic scale... A cinematic saga worthy of the ancestors.

It feels easy to bemoan the current state of cinema, with the dominance of titles based on pre-existing IP... But when watching a film like The Northman – gloriously loud and vast in conception and execution – a glimmer of hope for the future exists.

But few recent films on this scale have bustled with such intelligence and invention. They may not be making them like this for much longer... Perhaps Eggers has lost some of the horrible intimacy we savoured in his earlier work. But he offers us compensation in scope, intensity and pure bloody ferocity.

Eggers’ brand of psychological shock is bolder here than his prior works and potent in bursts, but barely works on boldness alone... [The Northman] works when considering its parts, but never really as a whole. The parts, however, are so thrilling, so uniquely calibrated to feverish, determined ends, that they elevate the entire film.

The casting is immaculate – Willem Dafoe and Ethan Hawke round out an ensemble that fit perfectly in this world – and the language is as rich as you’d expect from the man who wrote The Lighthouse and The Witch... Make it your destiny to see this blood-soaked odyssey along the edge of the world as soon as possible.

“The Northman” is gory, muddy, hallucinatory — and intensely entertaining... Without abandoning his arthouse credentials, Eggers has made a rousingly rough, extreme action saga that has the potential of attracting the kind of viewers who might have found his previous work impenetrable.

To date, Eggers’s aesthetic has had a harsh singularity – there’s nothing quite like those other two films. [The Northman] sells itself somewhat differently. It’s a mash-up of many cinematic formulae – never far from the meathead epics of Mel Gibson (or Gladiator); but dabbling too in the trippy mysticism of The Fountain. It reminds you of everything and nothing.

Stranded somewhere between an experimental art project and a mainstream Nordic answer to Gladiator, [The Northman is] certainly tamer than The Lighthouse... It feels compromised, but the great stuff outweighs the not-so-great stuff. To see or not to see? If that is the question, the answer is: see it.