Vikings don’t lack for precedent in the movies, yet the Old Norse boatmen have never quite taken hold in the collective filmgoer unconscious the same way as cowboys, pirates or mafiosi. The explanation may well be their inherent associations with paganism, cannibalism, rape and pillaging, traits understandably sanitized (if acknowledged at all) in late studio-era Viking narratives like Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings or Jack Cardiff’s The Long Ships. In 1984, Hrafn Gunnlaugsson—the supposed “bad boy” of Icelandic cinema—brought a pop-traditionalist sensibility to When The Raven Flies, which revisits Nordic mythology under the influence of spaghetti westerns, Kurosawa films and Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Gunnlaugsson’s stated aim was to make “the ultimate Viking movie”, and his trilogy (Raven Flies was followed by 1986’s In The Shadow of the Raven, and 1991’s Embla) deserves to be far better known; they are miniature epics, and the few outside of Scandinavia who know them probably have also heard them termed as “cod westerns.” More recently, crossed streams of renewed interest in capital-F Fantasy following Lord of the Rings and the New Extremity of mid-2000s horror cinema made possible Marcus Nispel’s deliriously braindead Vikings-and-Indians actioner Pathfinder (itself a distant remake of the onetime biggest Norwegian film ever made), and perhaps also Nicolas Winding Refn’s elegantly sadistic Valhalla Rising starring Mads Mikkelsen.
Enter Robert Eggers’ The Northman, starring Alexander Skarsgård: on the first page of Focus Features’ 62-page press kit, the filmmaker describes a deeply felt need to try and make “the Viking movie.” (He also describes the finished product as an “imperfect slain giant”.) Much like the aforementioned Raven trilogy, The Northman combines unfakeable scenery with a decidedly Scandinavian sense of macabre and mischief, plus the implied savagery that had been missing from rosier interpretations of Old Norse history. In terms of both budget and audience, it’s a significant leveling-up for Eggers, from A24 (the “boutique” producer-distributor of his previous two features, The Witch and The Lighthouse, both of which cost under $10 million) to the studio system. Straining to understand a lackluster opening weekend box office, some industry soothsayers described Eggers’ film as “arthouse”, which is ludicrous: even if it does betray whiffs of influence from Bergman, Żuławski, or Tarkovsky (and outright quotes/rips off Elem Klimov's Come And See), The Northman follows more obviously in the operatic meat-headed tradition of John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian. There’s no reason The Northman couldn’t have been a hit: the movie is sweeping, punishingly violent, loud to the point of being cacophonous, and aggressively male. (Almost every scene ends on somebody screaming, usually cut to loud, headache-worthy taiko-style drums.)
It’s bitterly ironic that The Northman has proven a risk from the studio perspective, in fact, because its only source material is an ur-text if ever there was one: the ancient myth of the avenging prince Amleth, the direct inspiration for Shakespeare’s Hamlet and its countless remakes. The story is given a fresh coat of paint - the film’s production design never skimps on the dirt, shit and blood that seem to be smeared all over everything - even while it grows more recognizable over the course of its retelling. Talking about his work on Eggers’ 2019 The Lighthouse in a recent New Yorker profile of the filmmaker, Willem Dafoe told writer Sam Knight that, “We didn’t really rehearse the scenes…What we rehearsed was that he would tell us where the camera would be.” This seems crucial to understanding Eggers’ overall project as filmmaker: dramatic meaning in Eggers’ films comes not from character or performance so much as from the power of sounds and images. Knight details Eggers’ exasperation at trying to go back and “fix” small things within individual long takes at the behest of his studio (New Regency), because the successful execution of the long single take is what dictates the drama of a given scene—effectively the opposite of the modern conventions for shooting drama, whereby coverage from different angles allows the filmmakers to reach the correct combination of elements in the edit (and, when possible, cover their mistakes.)
In the film’s middle passage, when Amleth has been adopted by a pack of viking “berserkers,” he participates in a brutal raid on a village—although it must be said that, as the audience already knows him to be pure of heart, Amleth is more witness to atrocity than perpetrator. Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke shoot this sequence in rolling long takes (Eggers refers to them as “oners”), like something out of a film by Miklós Jancsó or Aleksei German. But Jancsó—mentor to Béla Tarr, a selection of whose 60s works recently restored and made available by the Hungarian Film Archive—used long, floating oners to lure viewers in a kind of spectatorial trance whereby it was possible to forget about the camera. Watching The Northman, I couldn’t help but wonder if these were displays of filmmaking prowess for their own sake. The tableaux are impressive, determined to execute the mission faithfully, perfectly sequenced—but with no room for spontaneity or organic life on the margins. Even if the image breathes, the camera wagging one inch to the left or the right would mean losing all plausibility; the image would fall apart. The lack of dramatic substance in the screenplay, which is credited to Eggers and to monosyllabic Icelandic poet Sjón, leads the viewer to ascribe emotional meaning to the set pieces of carnage and sadism, offset by a Disney-grade romance between lead actor Alexander Skarsgård and a mystic sex slave played by Anya Taylor-Joy.
The point is not to denounce Eggers for not being John Cassavetes, but rather that putting so much stress on this kind of bravura choreography is how a young filmmaker lets the world know they are “serious” in 2022. Forget the tracking shot in Kapo or the Kraków ghetto liquidation sequence in Schindler’s List: in the 21st century landscape of violent, historical prestige cinema, a movie’s most “immersive” moments are also its most self-conscious, the ones that will be studied and replayed in the coming years. (I believe this demo-reel mentality is what Miklós Jancsó’s son David meant when he told me, last January, that cinematography has become a “technical sport.”) It’s not hard to see why Eggers’ fans see him as one of the few big-budget directors in America trying to keep a certain notion of cinema (stuntwork! timing! movement!) alive, on 35mm film no less. In the monochromatic marketplace of present-day Hollywood, anyone actively trying to do anything beyond the bare (or elaborately-composited CGI) minimum starts to look like a master filmmaker. Stripped of its unending sound and loudly thematized fury, what does The Northman really signify? Always, these adventures in gruesome iconography require us to consider the interplay of violence and spectatorship, and there’s no way to apply that lens without finding the relationship utterly confused in Eggers’ film. It speaks to the era of goofy qualifiers like “elevated horror”: it’s too gruesome to be mainstream, but too empty-headed to be arthouse; too ugly to be cherished, too beautifully made to be damned. Like other releases from “visionary” filmmakers put out by Eggers’ alma mater A24 (as well as NEON, Annapurna, et cetera), it’s an echo of genre, confused at the difference between history and spectacle—or between cinema, and the memory of what cinema was.