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Describing “The Northman” as director Robert Eggers' most accessible film verges on misleading. The filmmaker's prior works—the puritanical hallucinations of “ The Witch ” and the desolate, mermaid fetishization of “ The Lighthouse ”—traded in traditional macabre American folklore for unconventional, ambient freak-outs. “The Northman” repeats the best instincts of those films, though to lesser effect. It demands audiences deconstruct overbearing patriarchal values, toxic masculine heroism, and the folly of revenge by pulling viewers through extreme devotion to familial honor. Eggers’ brand of psychological shock is bolder here than his prior works and potent in bursts, but barely works on boldness alone.

When Eggers first released “The Witch” his brand of horror was deemed, backhandedly, as “elevated.” The New England filmmaker delivered genre-breaking frights with a fresh devil-may-care glee for the sinister that pushed the sonic and visual possibilities of supernatural angst. With “The Northman,” Eggers uses slicker aesthetics and broader emotions, played out over a grander scale, with his familiar interests in the inherent weirdness that courses through ancient mythology. It’s the tale of Amleth ( Alexander Skarsgård ), a hulking, enraged Viking warrior prince who’s seeking retribution for a lost kingdom in Scandinavia. Modern audiences will know this legend by its well-known English adaptation, Hamlet , recalling unbreakable Amleth’s resolve, as unforgiving as the punishing landscape, to earn back his usurped crown. 

This isn’t a prototypical hero’s journey replete with a dashing royal, however. Amleth occupies a different, harsher kill-or-be-killed era where no higher honor can befall a king than to die by the blade. His father King Aurvandill ( Ethan Hawke ), recently returned from war, damaged and wounded, worships this reality by preparing his young son for the eventuality of bloodshed: a carnal ritual taking place in a smoky, otherworldly cavern that involves a mystical invocation to the ancestors led by Heimir the Fool (an unhinged Willem Dafoe ), whereby Amleth and Aurvandill whoop and holler on all fours like wolves. In the world of “The Northman” we’re all just rabid animals occupying flabby sacks of human skin. The only obligations we have are primal: to avenge one’s father, and to defend one’s mother and kingdom. It’s an oath similarly taken by his mother Queen Gudrún ( Nicole Kidman ) and ignored by his uncle, the imposing black-bearded Fjölnir ( Claes Bang ), who, of course, brings tragedy to young Amleth’s life by killing his father—forcing him to far-flung shores where he becomes a bitter, musclebound warrior.  

Much of the film, lensed by Jarin Blaschke and edited by Louise Ford (Eggers' collaborators on “The Lighthouse” and “The Witch”), rests on a polished visual flair, exercising more camera movement than usual for the director. A vicious sequence involving Amleth and a band of skin-clad Vikings, covered in bear-pelt headdresses, edited with razor-sharp clarity by Ford, sees the pack methodically rampaging a village for kills. The elaborate tracking shot accompanying the scene feeds the camera’s delirious appetite for flesh with bodies bathed in blood, and the bone-chilling macho screams emanating from insatiable men. One shot, recalling Elem Klimov’s antiwar flick “ Come and See ,” finds a burning house filled with wailing villagers as a backdrop to Amleth’s unflinching gaze into the camera. Unlike Klimov’s film, this isn’t the image of a boy horrifically marked by war. This is a savage and defiant man fueled by conflict and gore.  

"The Northman" is the kind of movie where even the mud has rage; it is a visceral film filled with codas to the inescapable darker regions of nature: animal, elemental and the harshest of all, human. They all vibrate through Eggers’ signature warped soundscapes and Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough ’s brooding score, as ambient reverbs and decaying delays reach back toward primordial origins. The trippy hypnotic dreamscapes attempt a similar reach: the crack VFX team render Amleth’s family tree, an ever-evolving stand-in for divine rule, as a blue glowing arterial fern arising from his heart while connecting to ours. It’s one of the many magical tendrils intertwining, and sometimes knotting up, “The Northman,” a film where Björk portrays a blind seer pointing Amleth toward a sword with a dull-less blade and an unquenchable thirst for death. 

David Lowery ’s “ The Green Knight ” will probably serve as an all-too-easy comparison for many. But “The Northman” operates on a different emotional spectrum. This is a story of blind ambition stretched toward morally oblique ends in a world that prizes such malleability. That doesn’t mean these flawed characters don’t see themselves on the side of right. A virtuous anger fuels Amleth. And in a culture that’s weeded out male vulnerability, it’s down to Skarsgård to translate this man’s repressed emotions to a palpable rage. His romance with Olga ( Anya Taylor-Joy , reuniting with Eggers), an enslaved potion maker equally searching for revenge against Fjölnir, isn’t filled with amorous sweet nothings. You show love, you make the erotic a reality, and allow your horny rage to take centerstage by killing. And Amleth does plenty of blade swinging. These are fully committed performances by Skarsgård, Taylor-Joy, and especially Kidman, in a period piece filled with outright absurdity and silly suggestive one-liners.      

In that regard, “The Northman” often stumbles when it searches for profundity. As much as Eggers and his co-writer, the poet and novelist Sjón (“Lamb”), want to interrogate the place of women in these myths, that component bobs unmoored just below the surface. Outside of one spell, Olga remains within the confines of genre conventions without wholly subverting them. The last act is a slog, composed of a couple false endings hoping to attain a poetic plain. The final showdown between Fjölnir and Amleth, in the mouth of a volcano, in fact, is somehow anti-climactic. Certainly, the scene aims to explain the ways a hero’s journey, the expectation of fulfilling one’s destiny, no matter the consequences, carries a toxic burden, but the sentiment doesn’t translate in the overstated molten brouhaha.

Instead, this gory Viking tale 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. Because how can one complain about the "too muchness" of the Valkyries? How can one scoff at the dizzying, unexplainable flights of magic? Where would the fun be in that? “The Northman” makes you happy it exists, even if you’re not totally happy with it. 

In theaters exclusively on April 22.   

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the  New York Times ,  IndieWire , and  Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the  Los Angeles Times , and  Rolling Stone  about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

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Film credits.

The Northman (2022)

137 minutes

Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth

Nicole Kidman as Queen Gudrún

Claes Bang as Fjölnir the Brotherless

Ethan Hawke as King Aurvandil War-Raven

Anya Taylor-Joy as Olga of the Birch Forest

Gustav Lindh as Thórir the Proud

Elliott Rose as Gunnar

Willem Dafoe as Heimir the Fool

Björk as The Seeress

Rebecca Ineson as Halla the Maiden

Kate Dickie as Halldora the Pict

Ralph Ineson as Captain Volodymyr

• Robert Eggers

Director of Photography

• Jarin Blaschke
• Louise Ford

Original Music Composer

• Sebastian Gainsborough
• Robin Carolan

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‘The Northman’ Review: Danish Premodern

Alexander Skarsgard, Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicole Kidman star in Robert Eggers’s bloody Viking revenge saga.

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By A.O. Scott

“The Northman” tells a very old story — maybe the same old story. A young prince seeks to avenge the murder of his father, the king, whose killer has usurped the throne and married the prince’s mother. That’s “Hamlet,” of course, but Robert Eggers’s new film isn’t another Shakespeare screen adaptation, bristling with Elizabethan eloquence, high-toned acting and complex, uncannily modern psychology.

Eggers, who wrote the screenplay with the Icelandic novelist and playwright Sjon, has conjured this bloody saga out of the ancient Scandinavian narratives that supplied Shakespeare’s source material. His raw material, you might say, since “The Northman” insists on the primal, brutal, atavistic dimensions of the tale. Amleth, as he is called, is no student philosopher, temporizing over the nuances of being and nonbeing. He is a berserker, a howling warrior with ripped abs, superhero combat skills and a righteous cause for his endless blood lust.

This is what I mean by the same old story. In modern movies, even more than in 17th-century English plays, revenge can seem like the most — maybe the only — credible motive for heroic action. Just ask the Batman . Truth and justice are divisive abstractions, too easily deconstructed or dressed up in gaudy ideological colors. Love is problematic. Payback, in contrast, is clean and inarguable, even if it leaves a mess in its wake.

“Avenge father. Save mother. Kill uncle,” young Amleth repeats to himself as he flees the scene of his father’s death. These words propel him into manhood, as he grows from a wide-eyed boy played by Oscar Novak into a cold-eyed marauder played by Alexander Skarsgard.

Amleth inhabits a world whose operating principle is cruelty, and Eggers’s accomplishment lies in his fastidious, fanatical rendering of that world, down to its bed linens and cooking utensils. If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons, you may have encountered a dungeon master who took the game very, very seriously, attacking the task of fantasy world-building with excessive scholarly rigor and over-the-top imaginative zeal. That kind of player can be intimidating, but also a lot more fun than the average weekend geek.

Eggers is like that. His two previous features — “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” — unfold in versions of the past that split the difference between authenticity and hallucination. “The Witch” (2016) turns Puritan New England into a feverish, poisoned pastoral landscape of religious mania, unacknowledged lust and literal bedevilment. “The Lighthouse” (2019), set on a windswept island off the North Atlantic coast of America, is a clammy sea chantey about men going mad in close quarters.

Driven less by plot than by a succession of intensifying moods, these films dig into historical moments when the boundary between the human and the supernatural felt especially thin. Archaic forms of belief are treated not as quaint superstitions, but as ways of understanding scary or inexplicable facets of experience. The witches and mermaids are as real as anything else.

And so it is in “The Northman,” which, like “The Witch,” mines a shadow-shrouded pagan past for images and effects. In the 1600s of the earlier film, older customs and beliefs had been pushed into the margins by Christianity, but in this version of early medieval Northern Europe, that relationship is reversed. Christianity is mentioned in passing as a weird form of worship — “their God is a corpse nailed to a tree,” one character says — in a polytheistic, polyglot society made and unmade by endless conquest, migration and war.

As a boy, Amleth lives in a benevolent corner of this world. His father, Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke), is a pretty fun dad for a warrior chieftain, turning Amleth’s initiation ceremony into a night of silly, flatulent horseplay. Spiritual guidance is provided by a shamanistic fool (Willem Dafoe) and a spooky seeress (Björk). But nothing can protect Aurvandil from his bastard half brother, Fjolnir (Claes Bang), who kills the king and takes up with his wife, Gudrun (Nicole Kidman).

Later, Amleth’s child’s-eye view of what happened will be complicated when he hears Gudrun’s side of things. (Kidman’s sly performance is the most Shakespearean thing about “The Northman.”) First, though, he will join a band of Viking raiders, whose plunder of a town somewhere around Russia provides Amleth — and Eggers — a chance to show off their chops. Literally, in Amleth’s case, as he hacks, stabs and cudgels his way over ramparts and through muddy dooryards and alleyways.

Eggers, aided by Jarin Blaschke’s smooth, immersive cinematography, turns the scene into a Hieronymus Bosch painting in motion, a tableau of terror and chaos composed with remorseless clarity. There is something coldblooded in this matter-of-fact depiction of violence. Villagers are herded into a barn, which is sealed up and set ablaze. Rapes, beatings and disembowelments happen in the background or on the edges of the frame, barely noticed by our hero.

The purpose of the attack is to capture slaves who will be sorted and shipped off to various customers — including, Amleth learns, to Fjolnir, who has set up a new kingdom in Iceland with Gudrun and their sons. In the company of a captive named Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy, who also did some forestry in “The Witch”), Amleth joins the enslaved, smuggling himself across the sea to confront his nemesis at last.

We can leave the plot there. It moves in a straight, relentless line, but matters in the Fjolnir-Gudrun household get a little intricate once Amleth and Olga arrive on this scene. Her earth-goddess magical powers make her a formidable ally, though she isn’t only that. The hokeyness of the romance between Skarsgard and Taylor-Joy, from an old-school movie-lover’s point of view, is one of the best parts of “The Northman” — a touch of ultra-blond Hollywood glamour amid the Nordic mumbo-jumbo.

Which I totally respect. A recent profile in The New Yorker posited that “The Northman,” which lists several historical consultants in its credits, “might be the most accurate Viking movie ever made.” The evidence for this is in the production design (by Craig Lathrop) and the costumes (by Linda Muir), in the runic chapter titles and in the careful pronunciation of words like “Odin” and “Valhalla.” But fidelity to the past, however obsessive, is ultimately a minor, technical achievement, and “The Northman” is a movie with big — if somewhat obscure — ambitions.

Eggers’s brutal, beautiful vision of history compensates, as such visions often do, for the deficiencies of the present. It isn’t that anyone would be happier living Amleth’s life, or those of the nameless slaves and soldiers whose slaughter decorates his adventure. But his reality is built on clear and emphatic moral lines, on coherent (albeit harsh) ideas about honor, power and what gives meaning to life and death.

The point is not that you or any other modern person believes in these ideas — though I suppose there are some people who might pretend to — but that the characters are governed by them. Their fates make sense to them, and therefore to us as well. What’s perhaps most impressive about “The Northman” is that it hurtles through 136 minutes of musclebound, shaggy-maned mayhem without a whisper of camp or a wink of irony. Nobody is doing this for fun. Even if, in the end — thank goodness — that’s mostly what it amounts to.

The Northman Rated R. Endless blood lust, and some of the other kind, too. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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The Northman First Reviews: Bold, Unflinching, Visually Breathtaking

Critics say robert eggers' viking revenge tale boasts his trademark mysticism and sense of atmosphere, but it's a brutal, invigorating spectacle that's his most accessible film yet..

TAGGED AS: Action , Film , films , movie , movies

Robert Eggers , the bold visionary behind The Witch and The Lighthouse , is back with another ambitiously accurate period piece in The Northman . Starring Alexander Skarsgård as a Hamlet-esque Viking and Nicole Kidman as his mother, it is said to be the filmmaker’s most accessible yet, in part because it’s an historical action movie with a relatively sizable budget. The first reviews of The Northman are mostly very positive, with critics highlighting the performances and the craftsmanship, which come together in a spectacular blockbuster unlike any we’ve gotten in a long time.

Here’s what critics are saying about The Northman :

Is this one of the most unique films of the year?

It’s been a minute since we had something like it. It’s bold, gritty, and just downright awesome. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

While it’s a story you’ve seen before, you’ve never seen it like this. – Germain Lussier, io9.com

It is invigorating to see a studio-backed piece that is allowed to be uncompromisingly grim and savage. – Michelle Kisner, The Movie Sleuth

Among the best films I’ve seen in the last few years. It’s a stone-cold masterpiece. – Chris Bumbray, JoBlo’s Movie Network

The Northman feels unusually thin, with less meat on its bones than 2007’s schlocky Pathfinder or your basic Conan movie. – Peter Debruge, Variety

How does it compare to Robert Eggers’ other films?

A considerable step up in scope. – Jordan Raup, The Film Stage

With The Northman , he delivers what might be his most grounded and straightforward story thus far. – Patrick Cavanaugh, ComicBook.com

It makes the freaky artisanal horror that put director Robert Eggers on the map — The Witch and The Lighthouse — look like Disney movies. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

It’s less resonant than Eggers’ debut film, The Witch . – Katie Rife, Polygon

If there’s one thing The Northman is missing from the rest of Eggers’ oeuvre, it is that lack of madness that made parts of The Witch and The Lighthouse almost feel like a catharsis. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

It lacks the element of surprise that made The Witch and The Lighthouse feel like instant classics. – Peter Debruge, Variety

(Photo by Aidan Monaghan/©Focus Features)

Will mainstream audiences enjoy it?

They will. Because this is the kind of filmmaking that rips you out of your body so hard that you’re liable to forget what year it is. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

It’s his most accessible, and certainly the most exciting… The Northman isn’t a movie for everybody, but it’s the Robert Eggers movie that’s probably for the widest audience. – Germain Lussier, io9.com

Eggers’ most accessible film yet… though the bone-crunching gore and dashes of cosmic mystery prevent The Northman from being anything close to “mainstream.” – Hoai-Tran Bui, Slashfilm

The Northman is destined to be a bit of a cult favorite, but it may also have a chance at more. – Joey Magidson, Awards Radar

Eggers, who let his freak flag fly with A24, has reverted to a more conventional mode for this relatively mainstream Focus Features release, eschewing the elevated language of The Lighthouse . – Peter Debruge, Variety

Will it appeal to fans of history and historical epics?

Meticulously researched, it makes other Viking shows and movies look cartoonish by comparison. – Chris Bumbray, JoBlo’s Movie Network

The sets and costumes crafted by Eggers regulars Craig Lathrop and Linda Muir put any of the film’s contemporaries to shame (yes, even Gladiator … especially Gladiator ). – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

In terms of making history exciting and engrossing, The Northman is about as titillating as gateway drugs get. – Katie Rife, Polygon

What other comparisons does The Northman invite?

It’s as if The Green Knight got passed through a “bro” filter. – Hoai-Tran Bui, Slashfilm

It’s an audaciously bonkers movie that keeps threatening to careen off into some kind of weird no man’s land where Game of Thrones meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail . – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Feels more like a heavy-metal music video, a testosterone-fueled melange of fire, blood, nudity, and screaming, fueled by hatred and hallucinatory shamanic rituals. – Katie Rife, Polygon

This [Shakespearean] drama very much takes Amleth away from the thespian green room and simplifies the story along Lion King lines (no Hakuna Matata though). – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

The movie that The Northman most resembles is The Revenant , an impressively orchestrated marathon of misery that prioritized directorial skill over audience engagement. – Peter Debruge, Variety

How is Alexander Skarsgård in the lead?

Skarsgård has never been better or more suited to a role. – Hoai-Tran Bui, Slashfilm

Prince Amleth is the hunky, heroically vengeful killing machine with a heart that Skarsgård was born to play. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth should become his definitive role. It’s one of those unforgettable performances that seems bound to be iconic. – Chris Bumbray, JoBlo’s Movie Network

A superb Skarsgård balances the bodily vigorousness required with the shattered innocence that defines his part. – Carlos Aguilar, The Playlist

Muscles only go so far to compensate for the strange emptiness behind young Skarsgård’s eyes. – Peter Debruge, Variety

Will it particularly delight True Blood fans?

Longtime fans will get a kick out of him tapping into the cultural roots of his ancient True Blood vampire, Eric Northman, too. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

It’s truly a full-circle moment. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

How is Nicole Kidman?

It’s a role that truly highlights the range that Kidman is capable of. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

Kidman delivers some of her best work. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

It’s Nicole Kidman as Queen Gudrún who really steals the show. She has some incredibly intense, emotionally complex moments, and you believe every second. – Germain Lussier, io9.com

She delivers a performance so feral it seems to shake the very foundations of the frame she inhabits. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

Kidman is a hoot, juggling fire and ice in an enjoyably over-the-top turn. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

How is the action?

The fight sequences are incredible. Meticulously choreographed and shot with purpose. The battles are bloody and intense. It’s not overly stylized. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

The choreography of the combat scenes — both the staging and the shooting, in long, unbroken takes — is mind-blowing. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Like a grim, grounded war movie, in which the battle scenes play out in a slow, weighty, almost plodding manner, meticulously choreographed to be as brutish and realistic as possible. – Hoai-Tran Bui, Slashfilm

The inevitable final showdown [is] one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen on film. It’s as if George Lucas filmed the finale of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith for real. – Germain Lussier, io9.com

There’s a brilliant set piece where Eggers shoots a Berserker siege in a single, unbroken take that will be discussed for years to come. – Chris Bumbray, JoBlo’s Movie Network

The Northman is never dull. The sheer muscularity of Eggers’ direction denies it that chance… also, someone gets decapitated like every 10 minutes. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

How does the movie look?

Visually, The Northman is breathtaking combining beautiful vistas with fantastical imagery. – Michelle Kisner, The Movie Sleuth

Visually, The Northman is stunning, with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke boosting the film’s color palette with variations on light, shadow, and striking gray tones. – Mae Abdulbaki, Screen Rant

Blaschke’s cinematography is also noteworthy for its approach to instances of grace, coating them in either dazzling moonlight or the fantastical color palette of the northern lights. – Carlos Aguilar, The Playlist

Your jaw is so often left gaping in awe from its stunning cinematography and in terror from its ferocity to the point you might just resign yourself to keeping it open for the duration of the film. – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

The Northman’ s landscape imagery feels like a step down for a filmmaker who once seemed intent on imbuing his settings with an unnerving sense of character. – Mark Hanson, Slant Magazine

Are there any major problems?

Fissures do present themselves — not least of all a recurring CG-heavy vision of a family tree that plays like unnecessary connect-the-dots material to appease a wider audience. – Jordan Raup, The Film Stage

It’s somewhat disappointing that The Northman reveals itself to be so programmatic… Eggers’s film is sometimes frustratingly shackled to the obligations of plot. – Mark Hanson, Slant Magazine

The Northman lacks a sense of nuance in its characters and in its story… It barely scratches the surface of its story, leaving the audience with crumbs rather than a full feast. – Mae Abdulbaki, Screen Rant

Every character has a chance to shine individually. However, sometimes the relationships between them are a tad underbaked. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

The Scandinavian accents coming out of the mouths of actors like Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy and Ethan Hawke risk bringing on a House of Gucci trauma relapse. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

The pacing has a rocky start. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

Is this the kind of alternative blockbuster we need right now?

What Eggers has ambitiously crafted lands as an invigorating beacon for an industry in need of studio fare with substantial ideas and artistry. – Carlos Aguilar, The Playlist

The film makes you appreciate how seldom we get to see a big, noisy, brawling spectacle these days that’s grounded not in comic-book superheroes and villains but in culturally specific history. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

The simple fact that financiers had the chutzpah to bankroll such a big swing in the face of our blockbuster-or-bust theatrical climate would have felt like a (pyrrhic) victory against the forces of corporate homogenization, no matter who was behind the camera. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

In a wide release landscape of easy-to-please, vaporous entertainment, such feats should be celebrated. – Jordan Raup, The Film Stage

It’s a big risk to spend that much cash on an auteur-driven historical epic at a time when historical epics have largely fallen by the wayside. But what a beautiful risk it is. I call upon Odin: may The Northman make a billion dollars. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

The Northman opens in theaters on April 22, 2022.

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The Northman Reviews

Neither tragedy nor Eggers skimp on violence, screams, sweat, blood and swords, along with ambitious mise en scène, some of the best photography and one of the most epic soundtracks of the year. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Dec 19, 2023

Filled with stunning cinematography, the film is an intense, immersive, sometimes surreal, descent into an otherworldly milieu of folkloric horror and medieval barbarism.

Full Review | Oct 31, 2023

As a bloody and most certainly trippy revenge tale, The Northman is astounding in many places. Eggers may not have created the ultimate Viking tale, but he has crafted an astonishing spectacle that combines his established style with something larger.

Full Review | Sep 17, 2023

Eggers’ visual style is a roller coaster of primordial, oneiric imagery of an epic, wild landscape, turbulent supernatural forces and untamed nature sans any whiff of domestication.

Full Review | Aug 16, 2023

Robert Eggers has crafted one for the ages… The Northman is a cinematic epic that blew my mind from start to finish. Lavishing cinematography that brings to life this era, visceral violence that adds to the world, & a jaw dropping third act

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

The Northman is an incredibly gifted film full of hostility, genealogy, strength, and desire.

Violent and powerful from start to finish, The Northman tells an epic, period accurate Viking tale that easily immerses its audience throughout the entire run-time.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 25, 2023

The Northman is a story that’s been told many times over, and save for showcasing the stunning scenery of Ireland, this adaptation is nothing to write home about.

The Northman isn’t trying to elevate horror nor dismantle fetishistic fantasies. It’s a fully-formed exercise in realigning blockbuster pictures back to the way they should be: big, visually breathtaking, and bolstered by a unique vision.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 21, 2023

By the time the end credits hit, you will be waiting for it to begin anew, and that is one of the highest compliments you could give a movie of this size and breadth.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 21, 2023

It provides all the weirdness, gore, beauty and singularity that you would expect from this director’s take on a Viking tale of vengeance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 9, 2023

The Northman’s carefully choreographed, single-shot takes and startlingly lit close-ups blow the spatially disorienting and over-edited style of so many contemporary action films completely out of the fjord.

Full Review | May 9, 2023

The Northman is practically bursting with testosterone. The story of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), a Viking Prince hellbent on revenge, Robert Eggers‘s third film is essentially a case study in the destructive nature of unyielding masculinity.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Feb 18, 2023

Northman is one of Robert Egger best films. The scope, the scale, the atmospheric building of Norse mythology is groundbreaking. Along with some insanely well acted performances and beyond thrilling action and revenge based story. Must Watch Masterpiece!

Full Review | Original Score: 9.5/10 | Dec 26, 2022

The Northman creates a unique saga that taps into something truly primal before one hell of an ending.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Dec 4, 2022

An intoxicating and epic blend of violence, mysticism, and breathtaking visuals.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 11, 2022

Spectacle, pageantry and myth combine with blood, mud and abs for a dazzling, uproarious Viking spree in which Alexander Skarsgård seeks to avenge the murder of his father with the aid of Anya Taylor-Joy and Icelandic national treasure Björk.

Full Review | Oct 3, 2022

The Northman stands as a stark reminder that there is still a place in cinema for gorgeous, inspired odysseys, rife with literary allusions, deep-seated spiritual meanings, and an exploration of complex human emotions.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Sep 24, 2022

This brutally violent, yet soaringly lyrical action epic is quite unlike anything captured on screen before.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2022

The Northman is an epic the likes of which we hardly see in Hollywood anymore, carefully curated by a master of the medium and packed with powerhouse performances.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 1, 2022

Review: Robert Eggers’ mighty Viking epic ‘The Northman’ puts the art before the Norse

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Not long into Robert Eggers’ “The Northman,” a mad and mesmerizing song of Iceland and fire, the camera plunges down into darkness, as if it had suddenly been swallowed up by the Earth. It’s AD 895, on a frigid North Atlantic island, and we’re following a scrawny young Viking prince, Amleth (Oscar Novak), and his scraggly bearded father, King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), as they descend into a firelit temple, where the royal stripling is led through a muddy, bloody rite of manhood. Amid much growling, howling, floating and farting, Aurvandil predicts his own impending demise and makes Amleth vow to avenge him — an oath sealed in blood and destined to be fulfilled with great geysers of gore and lava.

There are many such grim prophecies and elemental eruptions in “The Northman,” starting with the movie’s arresting opening shot of a volcano belching smoke, fire and voice-over. (I didn’t catch every word, but the volcano might as well be saying, “Behold. Cinema.”) Aurvandil’s fatalistic vision will soon be proved correct: After returning home from distant battlefields, the king is brutally slain by his brother, Fjölnir (Claes Bang, “The Square” ). Amleth, having witnessed his uncle’s betrayal, barely escapes alive but vows to return and avenge his father, as promised, and save his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), whom Fjölnir has taken as his wife. And return he will decades later, now played by a strapping, towering Alexander Skarsgård in full-blown Old Norse berserker mode, who tears into this role like a man — and an actor — seizing hold of his destiny.

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If you sense some mimicry in this madness, well spotted: The legend of Prince Amleth was the direct inspiration for “Hamlet,” though Skarsgård’s mighty warrior also hails from a cinematic pantheon of vengeance seekers broad enough to include Conan the Barbarian , Maximus and Inigo Montoya . If that makes “The Northman” sound derivative, it is: a witchy brew of Old Norse mythology, Hollywood pageantry and proto-Shakespearean revenge epic.

But Skarsgård (also one of the movie’s producers) has found an ideal collaborator in Eggers, a director sufficiently steeped in film history to know the difference between inspiration and imitation. Like his memorable period freakouts “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse,” though on a vastly more ambitious scale, “The Northman” is both a dazzling display of film craft and a sly retooling of genre, a movie that delights in fulfilling certain conventions while turning others on their artfully severed heads.

Robert Eggers knew he’d have to fight for his vision of ‘The Northman.’ The result was worth it

Robert Eggers makes his most ambitious film yet with Viking saga ‘The Northman,’ combining historical accuracy with a fantasy mysticism.

April 22, 2022

And so while it’s clear enough how Amleth’s story will end, the long arc of his journey takes unpredictable, even unsettling turns. When we first meet Skarsgård’s fully grown Amleth, he’s joined a band of murderous marauders, clad in wolf skins as they bring a Slavic village to its knees. Eggers, shooting nearly every scene in fluid, intricately choreographed long takes, gives the action the deliberation and intensity of an ancient ritual. (The sweepingly immersive cinematography is by Jarin Blaschke, the spare, purposeful editing by Louise Ford.) This violence is the way of the world, the movie suggests, and the atrocities we’re witnessing — a burning hut evokes the wartime conflagrations of Elem Klimov’s “Come and See” — are as unexceptional as they are unbearable.

Amleth, courting and thwarting our sympathies at will, is a very strong link in an endless chain of death. (He’s not alone, to judge by an end-credits crawl loaded with names like “Hrólfur Split-Lip” and “Thórfinnr Tooth-Gnasher.”) As Amleth goes on his latest feral rampage, you can’t help but wonder about how many children he’s orphaning and how many spinoff revenge dramas he’s setting in motion.

And Skarsgård, a charmer with an undercurrent of aloofness, is perfectly cast as a warrior so numb to carnage that it takes a supernatural intervention to remind him of his sworn mission: Fjölnir, Amleth learns, has been dethroned and fled with Gudrún and his sons to Iceland. It’s only fitting that this news is delivered by a witchy seeress played by Iceland’s biggest star, Björk, resplendent in oracular blue lighting and a Cher-worthy seashell-ringed headdress.

Björk is one of two prominent Icelandic talents pressed into service here. The other is poet and novelist Sjón, who co-wrote the screenplay with Eggers (and who supplied lyrics for Björk’s last major movie, 2000’s “Dancer in the Dark” ). Their involvement speaks to Eggers’ characteristic insistence on verisimilitude, born of an obsessive, research-driven approach to filmmaking that might seem persnickety if it weren’t so passionate. A production and costume designer before he turned to directing, Eggers has become our great builder of worlds in extremis: After the spooky Puritan New England of “The Witch” and the lonely maritime outpost of “The Lighthouse,” he once again conjures a nightmarish vision of humanity on the precipice.

But despite the fastidiousness of “The Northman’s” animal-pelts-and-chain-mail aesthetic, the filmmaking feels freer, looser and nuttier this time around — and not just because the spotty visual record of ancient Viking culture leaves plenty to an artist’s imagination. (The director’s splendid regular collaborators include production designer Craig Lathrop and costume designer Linda Muir.) Happily, Eggers makes movies, not research papers, and his sweet spot is that zone where his art-film idiosyncrasies merge with a genuine flair for Hollywood showmanship. Witness the self-consciously florid dialogue, sometimes poetically heightened to the point of torture. Witness too the inspired scenery chewing and quasi-Scandinavian accents indulged by Hawke (gone too soon) and especially Kidman, whose performance as the seemingly demure Gudrún turns out to be one of the movie’s most deliciously barbed surprises.

You may recall that Skarsgård and Kidman play a troubled couple in the HBO miniseries “Big Little Lies,” an association that gives Amleth and Gudrún’s eventual scenes together that much more of a feverish Oedipal charge. But Eggers is in no mood to hasten the family reunions and revelations, or to blow his protagonist’s cover. Amleth arrives on Fjölnir’s farm a slave, having stowed away in a boat full of war prisoners, and he’s wily enough to pass himself off for a while as a hard worker and seemingly loyal family servant. He and an enslaved ally, Olga (a fine Anya Taylor-Joy, reteaming with Eggers after “The Witch”), bide their time and share their bodies and secrets, laying the groundwork for a campaign of deadly sabotage against Fjölnir’s household.

Those schemes, when they come to pass, are initially attributed to the work of evil spirits. And while Amleth will eventually take his rightful credit as the author of Fjölnir’s pain, the spirit world — the raw material of the Icelandic myths that are this story’s lifeblood — is of supreme importance here. Eggers, plunging headlong into his material, draws no distinction between fantasy and reality, though as a storyteller, he is naturally inclined toward an ardent defense of paganism in all its forms. Just as “The Witch” critiqued 17th-century Puritan repression with a gleeful embrace of nude bonfire-dancing devilry, so “The Northman,” with its ominous ravens, bearded he-witches and helmeted Valkyries, treats Viking mythology as its own living, breathing, dazzling reality.

You may find yourself longing for more of that fantasy, perhaps as a distraction from the inexorable death march that Amleth’s journey is destined to become. Eggers, who likes to conjure elaborate visions only to attack their foundations from within, works hard to inflect that journey with a self-critical spirit. There’s a productive tension at the heart of “The Northman,” a tug-of-war between the Hollywood revenge-epic tradition from which it superficially hails and the sharper, more subversive dismantling of simplistic payback fantasies it wants to be.

The final passages are laced with surprises you may or may not see coming, bitter reversals of perspective that complicate — but don’t entirely mitigate — the pleasures of watching a wronged man settle an old score. Bang makes Fjölnir an implacable brute, but not an unsympathetic one. The same is true of Skarsgård, whose career-igniting role on “True Blood,” a vampire with Viking roots and the name of Eric Northman, feels like both a sequel and a warm-up act to this one. Amleth may be no unblemished hero, but with a bulging, blood-caked torso and a willingness to storm the gates of hell, he can still lead you on a trek straight to cinematic Valhalla.

‘The Northman’

Rating: R, for strong bloody violence, some sexual content and nudity Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes Playing: Starts April 22 in general release

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Alexander skarsgard and nicole kidman in robert eggers’ ‘the northman’: film review.

Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy and Ethan Hawke also star in this big, bloody medieval Viking saga of fate, family and revenge.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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It’s been a while since we’ve had an all-out blood-and-guts battle orgy in which warriors outfitted in sackcloth and animal skins hurl themselves into the fray, wielding swords and blazing torches, shields, hatchets and daggers, while bellowing dialogue that mostly begins and ends with “RAAARRRGGGHHH!” There’s a lot of that in The Northman , a brawny fever dream which makes the freaky artisanal horror that put director Robert Eggers on the map — The Witch and The Lighthouse — look like Disney movies. To use a term from a ritualistic fireside chant where Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth blurs the line between man and beast, this is the untamed “berserker” of Norse legends.

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Navigating the leap from his modestly budgeted previous instant-cult films to this large-scale $90 million bloodbath for Focus Features , Eggers is nothing if not fearless. Benefitting again from the exactingly detailed work of production designer Craig Lathrop and costumer Linda Muir, the director conjures an immersive, pungently evocative atmosphere that catapults us back to the turn of the 10th century, a dark and viscerally violent past in which human savagery and the supernatural co-exist.

The Northman

Release date : Friday, April 22 Cast : Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Björk Director : Robert Eggers Screenwriters : Sjón, Robert Eggers

The inadvertently campy dialogue in the script Eggers co-wrote with Icelandic novelist and poet Sjón ( Lamb ) quite often prompts giggles, and the Scandinavian accents coming out of the mouths of actors like Nicole Kidman , Anya Taylor-Joy and Ethan Hawke risk bringing on a House of Gucci trauma relapse. It’s an audaciously bonkers movie that keeps threatening to careen off into some kind of weird no man’s land where Game of Thrones meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail . And that’s even before Björk drops by as a witchy seeress, outfitted in wicker work, seashells and beads.

But The Northman ’s marauding energy holds you hostage and Prince Amleth is the hunky, heroically vengeful killing machine with a heart that Skarsgård was born to play. Longtime fans will get a kick out of him tapping into the cultural roots of his ancient True Blood vampire, Eric Northman, too.

The screenplay draws from both Norse myths and Icelandic family sagas, building on the Scandinavian legend of Amleth that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet . The prologue takes place in the fictitious North Atlantic island kingdom of Hrafnsey, where King Aurvandil (Hawke), aka War-Raven, arrives home to much fanfare. The gash in his guts inflicted by a foe in battle prompts him to prepare the 10-year-old Amleth (Oscar Novak) to take over the throne, despite the objections of Queen Gudrún (Kidman) that their son is just a boy. Amleth’s transcendental initiation involves crawling around on all fours underground with his father, howling like wolves. Also, belching, farting, levitating and accessing disturbing visions via Aurvandil’s wound.

No sooner has Amleth sworn to avenge his father should he die by an enemy’s sword than the boy witnesses his murder at the hands of his uncle Fjölnir ( Claes Bang ), whose friskiness with the Queen has already been joked about by the shamanistic court fool, Heimir (Willem Dafoe).

“Bring me the boy’s head,” Fjölnir commands his men, accompanied by the shrieking strings and pounding drums of Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough’s hard-driving score. But Amleth, after watching the slaughter of male villagers, abduction of the women and the Queen slung over Fjölnir’s shoulder and hauled off screaming, escapes by boat. He vows to rescue his mother, kill his uncle and avenge his father.

A couple decades later, Amleth has transformed into a muscle-bound man harnessing the spirit of both a wolf and a bear. He’s rage personified, traveling the Land of the Rus with a pack of Viking raiders that seemingly never met a Slavic settlement they couldn’t plunder. But Björk’s earth-mother seeress recognizes him as the lost prince and reminds him of his fate. Learning that Fjölnir was driven from the kingdom he usurped and fled to a remote agrarian community in Iceland, Amleth boards a slave ship headed there to supply labor.

Anya Taylor-Joy plays a fellow passenger who knows a good hook-up when she sees one. “I am Olga of the Birch Forest,” she says by way of introduction, adding that while he has the strength to break men’s bones, she has the cunning to break their minds. Both get taken on at Fjölnir’s farm, where Olga gradually gains Amleth’s trust and he reveals his plan to murder his uncle and save his mother, whom he believes is only feigning love for her abductor for the sake of their young son (Elliott Rose).

Eggers’ films have shared a fascination with the magical properties of animals — a goat in The Witch (love you, Black Phillip), a cursed seagull in The Lighthouse . The occult fauna this time is wolf cubs and ravens, the former leading Amleth to find a massive sword of the undead, known as The Night Blade; the latter getting busy with their beaks when he’s tortured and bound late in the game.

The storytelling accelerates as Amleth gets closer to his goal, wreaking carnage among his uncle’s men and sparking fear of a “distempered spirit” in their midst. The plotting becomes more frenetic though remains lucid, even if there are one or two arch moments that had me almost howling like a wolf.

Gudrún’s reunion with the son she long believed to be dead should have been a moment of high drama. But it’s hard not to laugh when Kidman, wearing Daryl Hannah’s old crimped hair from Splash and sporting a Natasha Fatale accent, greets a mighty silver blade at her throat with, “Your sword is long,” before engaging in some incestuous flirtation. When Fjölnir suffers a grievous loss and screams, “What evil is this?!” Gudrún shoots him a wide-eyed death stare and snaps, “Behave!” like she’s a Nordic Austin Powers.

The romance between Amleth and Olga also has time to blossom during all this, complete with a post-coital respite in the woods right out of John Boorman’s Excalibur . There’s also an interlude on a flying horse ridden by a fiery-eyed Valkyrie (Ineta Sliuzaite). But even as Amleth ensures the continuation of his bloodline, his deathly appointment with uncle Fjölnir at “the gates of hell” remains.

That would be the mouth of an active volcano, where they fight nude, as any self-respecting medieval warrior would, though their digitally erased penises make them look distractingly like Ken dolls. I could be wrong, but their smooth groins in the lava light look more like the result of studio interference than prudishness on the part of the actors or of a director so intent on presenting a world suspended between life and legend in all its gritty glory.

The film is shot by Eggers’ regular DP Jarin Blaschke, with restless propulsion and with a textured feel for the dramatic landscapes, lashed by rain, wind, snow and ice, or coated with mud and ash. The choreography of the combat scenes — both the staging and the shooting, in long, unbroken takes — is mind-blowing. Also fully enveloping is the dense sound design, with Viking Age instruments like the birch horn and bone flute heard alongside the thundering elements and the chaos of fighting.

The Northman is certainly a lot of movie, and while its hysterical intensity at times veers into overwrought silliness, it’s both unstinting and exhilarating in its depiction of a culture ruled by the cycles of violence. The cohesion of Eggers’ vision commands admiration, as does the commitment of his collaborators, both in front of and behind the camera.

Skarsgård, who has been working for more than a decade to develop a film project rooted in his childhood love of Viking myth and lore, has never been fiercer or more physically imposing. Taylor-Joy, who got her start in The Witch , is beguiling as Olga weaves baskets and plots havoc. (Her parents from that earlier film, Kate Dickie and Ralph Ineson, also make appearances.) Kidman is a hoot, juggling fire and ice in an enjoyably over-the-top turn. And if someone doesn’t cast Bang as a Bond nemesis or some other suitably elevated evildoer soon, then Hollywood just isn’t paying attention.

Whether you buy into Eggers’ insane epic, get high on its blood-drenched sorcery or roll your eyes at its excesses, the film makes you appreciate how seldom we get to see a big, noisy, brawling spectacle these days that’s grounded not in comic-book superheroes and villains but in culturally specific history. In other words, a work of bold imagination, not another offshoot of a familiar IP. That alone deserves respect.

Full credits

Distribution: Focus Features Production companies: New Regency, Square Peg Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Björk, Gustav Lindh, Elliott Rose, Oscar Novak, Kate Dickie, Ralph Ineson, Phill Martin, Eldar Skar, Olwen Fouéré, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Ineta Sliuzaite Director: Robert Eggers Screenwriters: Sjón, Robert Eggers Producers: Lars Knudsen, Mark Huffam, Robert Eggers, Alexander Skarsgård, Arnon Milchan Executive producers: Yariv Milchan, Michael Schaeffer, Sam Hanson, Thomas Benski Director of photography: Jarin Blaschke Production designer: Craig Lathrop Costume designer: Linda Muir Music: Robin Carolan, Sebastian Gainsborough Editor: Louise Ford

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The Northman brings Viking history to life with a roar of bloody defiance

It’s a vivid look at the past, rendered in gore and grime, but it’s shallow compared to Robert Eggers’ past work

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The Witch and The Lighthouse director Robert Eggers is many things. He’s a meticulous craftsman with an eye for striking compositions. He’s a bearded hipster in a Carhartt jacket. If Facebook commenters are to be believed, he’s an “elevated horror” bogeyman who represents everything that’s wrong with the genre today. But above all that, he’s a history nerd. Eggers is the type of person who reads medieval Icelandic literature for fun — which is exactly how his latest project, the bloody Viking revenge saga The Northman , came into being.

The film’s press notes describe it as a painstakingly researched deep dive into the Viking lifestyle and worldview, backed by archaeologists and historians. But the experience of watching it isn’t nearly so dry and lofty. The actual movie feels more like a heavy-metal music video, a testosterone-fueled melange of fire, blood, nudity, and screaming, fueled by hatred and hallucinatory shamanic rituals.

As is always the case in Eggers’ films, the line between belief in the supernatural and actual supernatural events is open to individual interpretation. But the characters have no doubt that the dead walk in the shadows, men can be possessed by wolves, and Valkyries will come to escort them to Valhalla if they’re lucky enough to die in battle. This is a movie where a wizard casts a spell using pieces cut off of Willem Dafoe’s severed, dessicated head, and Björk appears with a crown of wheat and the fates of men spun between her fingers.

Alexander Skarsgård stars as Amleth, son of a warrior-monarch known as the Raven King (Ethan Hawke). In childhood, Amleth witnesses his father’s murder at the hands of his uncle Fjölnir (Cleas Bang), and dedicates his life to revenge. The Shakespearan parallels grow deeper when Fjölnir marries his brother’s wife, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), who turns out to be a better Lady Macbeth than anyone in the Scottish play. As an adult, Amleth discovers this by following rumors to Iceland, where Fjölnir and his men have reinvented themselves as sheep farmers after losing their stolen kingdom to mightier Norwegian marauders. There, Amleth disguises himself as a slave and embarks on a campaign of guerilla warfare with the help of Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy), a Slavic witch who is also enslaved on Fjölnir’s land. Amleth is also aided by ravens, which periodically appear and remind him of the injustice done to his family.

The violence that follows (and precedes) Amleth’s arrival in Iceland is gory and graphic, and Eggers films Viking raids on humble villages in impressively choreographed tracking shots that glide through the blood, mud, and gurgling death rattles of dozens of sackcloth-clad extras. The dialogue similarly blends savagery with bombast: One character chokes out a death curse, promising to plague his killer until “a flaming vengeance gorges on your flesh.” Another optimistically tells a friend, “together we will rage on the battlefield of corpses.” Place all this against the majestic Icelandic landscape and an aural backdrop of booming drums and deep bass chants that roll in like a thunderstorm, and the effect is appropriately awe-inspiring.

Although the scene where Amleth bludgeons a man to death with his head is probably not historically necessary, the brutality on display throughout The Northman isn’t entirely gratuitous. Viking culture placed great emphasis on dominance through brute force: At one point, a character refers to becoming a “graybeard” — i.e., living long enough for your hair to turn white — as a shameful fate that’s worse than death. (For the women, this culture of subjugation manifests as the continual threat of sexual violence, which Eggers thankfully leaves mostly offscreen.) This contrasts with a more modern narrative thread, questioning whether Amleth’s revenge plot is ultimately a futile and misguided gesture.

Without going into too much detail, Amleth (and Eggers) ultimately decide to take the culturally accurate route. This neatly wraps up the narrative, but it points to a weakness in The Northman that makes it less resonant than Eggers’ debut film, The Witch . That film asked whether it was witchcraft or a society that believed in witchcraft that was to blame for the persecution of women like the protagonist, Thomasin (also played by Taylor-Joy). That thread is present here, too, although Eggers seems to be having more fun leading the wild hunt than pondering its implications.

And ultimately, the more thoughtful themes in The Northman ’s script are drowned out by the beating of feral drums, and washed away in a river of carnage, culminating in a grimy naked swordfight in a field of lava, as repeatedly promised by prophecy throughout the film. But although the film ends up as a shallow rumination on revenge and single-minded dominance, it’s hard to beat as spectacle. In terms of making history exciting and engrossing, The Northman is about as titillating as gateway drugs get.

The Northman is available in theaters now.

• Cast & crew
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The Northman

A young Viking prince is on a quest to avenge his father's murder. A young Viking prince is on a quest to avenge his father's murder. A young Viking prince is on a quest to avenge his father's murder.

• Robert Eggers
• Alexander Skarsgård
• Nicole Kidman
• 2.2K User reviews
• 374 Critic reviews
• 82 Metascore
• 6 wins & 65 nominations

• Queen Gudrún

• Fjölnir the Brotherless

• King Aurvandil War-Raven

• Olga of the Birch Forest

• Thórir the Proud

• Heimir the Fool

• Hallgrímr Half-Troll

• Finnr the Nose-Stub

• Áshildur Hofgythja

• Hersveinn Battle Hard
• Hjalti Battle Hasty

• (as Ingvar Sigurðsson)
• Young Amleth

• Hallur Freymundur

• The Mound Dweller
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• Trivia In the scene in which the Úlfhéðnar attack the Slavic town, Amleth catches a spear in midair and throws it back at the Slavs in one movement. This is taken from the medieval Icelandic story of Njáls saga in which Audolf throws a spear at the Viking hero Gunnar, but Gunnar catches it in midair and throws it straight through Audolf and his shield.
• Goofs The runic inscription of "Amleth's Saga" is written incorrectly in the movie version as opposed to the trailer of The Northman where it is correct. The title shown in the trailer written with runes can be translated to "amluthasaka" or amlóða saga, amleth's saga. However at the end of the actual movie the title is missing the rune of "a" from its word saga, making it read akin to "Amleth's sga".

Young Amleth : I will avenge you, Father! I will save you, Mother! I will kill you, Fjölnir!

• Crazy credits The film title and the intertitles appear in ancient Norse runes.
• Connections Featured in The Critical Drinker: The Northman - We Need More Movies Like This (2022)

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• Apr 15, 2022
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• Will composer Mark Korven reunite with Robert Eggers to compose the score for this Viking epic?
• April 22, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• United Kingdom
• Official Focus Features
• Chiến Binh Phương Bắc
• Hekla, Rangárvallasýsla, Iceland
• New Regency Productions
• Universal Pictures
• Focus Features
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $70,000,000 (estimated)
• $34,233,110
• $12,290,800
• Apr 24, 2022
• $69,633,110

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• Runtime 2 hours 17 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
• Dolby Surround 7.1
• Dolby Digital

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‘The Northman’ Review: Alexander Skarsgård Hacks His Way Through Bloody Viking Epic

'The Witch' director Robert Eggers has vision to burn, but robs this brutal 10th-century revenge story of the tragic twist it needs to hook us emotionally.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Fields glow kryptonite green against volcanic black soil, while not-so-distant mountains smoke and spew hot red lava above the heads of hardy sheep. Nowhere else on Earth looks like Iceland, which is why so many productions over the past decade — from “Interstellar” and “Oblivion” to “Game of Thrones” and “Thor” — have used its peerless primordial terrain to represent alternate dimensions and far-off planets.

Iceland plays itself in Robert Eggers ’ “ The Northman ,” a brutal tale of 10th-century Viking revenge that makes evocative use of far more than just the scenery to be found in this stunning Nordic outpost. Teaming with local novelist Sjón, Eggers — a visionary director with a preternatural interest in history, as evidenced by his rigorously detail-oriented horror movies “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” — also draws from the region’s rich folklore, looking to the sagas of Iceland, as well as the same Scandinavian legend that inspired Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” to mount the classiest Vikesploitation epic you can imagine, complete with a doomsday Björk cameo. That it’s ultimately rather dull and hardly any fun is almost beside the point.

Blame that largely on Alexander Skarsgård, son of towering European talent Stellan (“Breaking the Waves”). Alexander’s as handsome a star as Sweden has produced, but sorely lacks the charisma to carry a movie of this scale — rumored to have cost $90 million. Though he’s bulked up significantly since his comparably physical turn in 2016’s largely unnecessary “The Legend of Tarzan,” muscles only go so far to compensate for the strange emptiness behind young Skarsgård’s eyes. And so, this scion of art-house royalty has much to prove in a starring role that borrows heavily from “Gladiator” and pretty much every Mel Gibson movie (but mostly “Braveheart”).

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The story is simple — too simple, alas: Puny prince Amleth (played as a boy by Oscar Novak) eagerly welcomes his father, Viking king Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), back from battle, undergoing an initiation ceremony that will set him on course to rule the tribe one day. “You are dogs who wish to become men,” growls the fool (Willem Dafoe), though Amleth’s animal instincts will not reveal themselves until much later. Upon exiting the trippy ritual, father and son are confronted by half-brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang), who relieves the king of his crown, and the head to which it is attached, then orders the same fate for his son, who escapes, repeating the words, “I will avenge you, Father. I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir.”

This mantra is practically all the plot “The Northman” offers, skipping forward across the years that many would find most compelling — when this tender child acquires the skills of strength and mind that make him capable of facing off against his uncle, who has taken Amleth’s mother, Gudrún (Nicole Kidman, blazing with unrivaled fury), as his queen. In most respects, Eggers is a unique artist with strong, singular ideas of how to script, stage and pace his films, and while “The Northman” is nothing if not a signature addition to a most original oeuvre — no one but Eggers would or could have reimagined “Hamlet” thus — it lacks the element of surprise that made “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” feel like instant classics.

Over the course of a portentous 137 minutes, Amleth will dutifully avenge his father, “save” his mother and face off against Fjölnir, but none of it makes even a fraction of the emotional impact we’d expect from even the crassest sword-and-sandal movie. Eggers’ films tend to play on a different, more self-conscious level, where audiences’ pleasure comes as much from atmosphere and all-around weirdness as it does from deranged narratives that, in retrospect, are destined to have played out exactly as they did. If anything, the oddity factor should be greater here than ever, given Eggers’ fetishistic commitment to weaving elements of Norse mythology alongside the punishing Icelandic action. To that end, visions of screaming Valkyries (model Ineta Sliuzaite) and a haggard He-Witch (Ingvar Sigurðsson) pack a hallucinatory punch amid the otherworldly locales.

Still, “The Northman” feels unusually thin, with less meat on its bones than 2007’s schlocky “Pathfinder” or your basic “Conan” movie. Eggers, who formerly let his freak flag fly with A24, has reverted to a more conventional mode for this relatively mainstream Focus Features release, eschewing the elevated language of “The Lighthouse” and avoiding the kind of surrealism seen in David Lowery’s “The Green Knight” last year — a film that should have paved the way for far greater expressionism here. The movie that “The Northman” most resembles is “The Revenant,” an impressively orchestrated marathon of misery that prioritized directorial skill over audience engagement. Eggers’ feat seems similarly monomaniacal in its mission, often at the expense of the human dimension.

After raiding a Slavic village in a spectacular early scene, filmed in what appears to be a single uninterrupted take, Amleth hears the prediction that will snap him out of berserker mode and set him in motion to fulfill his destiny. His rather implausible plan involves branding his chest and sailing to Iceland with a boat full of Slavic slaves, including an almond-eyed beauty with platinum hair named Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy).

Olga proves to be both an asset and a distraction to Amleth upon reaching Iceland, suggesting a path his life could take if he were to set aside his fixation on revenge in favor of romance, Óðinn willing. This alternative is made explicit in a scene that seems all wrong for the movie, set aboard a Viking longship, as the actors stand crudely haloed against CG backdrops, suggesting either reshoots (this is only a guess, though it would explain what doesn’t work about the last act of the film) or a grave miscalculation as to what motivates the final, fiery showdown between Amleth and Fjölnir.

There’s a tried-and-true formula for revenge movies, which are tragic by their very nature, that depends on repeated demonstrations of evil by a figure who deserves to be destroyed. That model would require Fjölnir to do something unforgivable to Olga, since she’s the only thing in the world Amleth cares about. Failing that, he comes across as a cruel and merciless protagonist, bent on crushing the life of a man whom fate has already humbled. We still want to see him succeed, battling it out in the buff against the flaming Gates of Hel, but by this point, a film that has shown such painstaking attention to craft over character seems to be running more on testosterone than sensitivity.

Reviewed at Dolby Laboratories screening room, Burbank, Calif., April 5, 2022. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 137 MIN.

• Production: A Focus Features release of a Focus Features, Regency Enterprises presentation, in association with Perfect World Pictures of a New Regency, Square Peg production. Producers: Lars Knudsen, Mark Huffam, Robert Eggers, Alexander Skarsgård, Arnon Milchan. Co-producer: Francesca Cingolani. Executive producers: Yariv Milchan, Michael Schaefer, Sam Hanson, Thomas Benski.
• Crew: Director: Robert Eggers. Screenplay: Sjón, Robert Eggers. Camera: Jarin Blaschke. Editor: Louise Ford. Music: Robin Carolan, Sebastian Gainsborough.
• With: Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Björk, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie. (English, Old Norse dialogue)

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• Robert Eggers’ <i>The Northman</i> Is a Visually Resplendent Viking Saga

Robert Eggers’ The Northman Is a Visually Resplendent Viking Saga

D ads! Planning a motorcycle trip anytime soon with your sons? Mom staying behind because she has “stuff to do”? Vroom—don’t walk—to the nearest cinema showing Robert Eggers’ The Northman , a visually resplendent Viking saga enfolding revenge, ideals of familial duty, and awesome silver jewelry.

Eggers co-wrote the film with the Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón, with an eye toward capturing old Norse culture as a rich repository of art, poetry, and spiritual beliefs. Other contributions to history include tests of manhood involving farting and belching. The Vikings were complicated people.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

The story opens in the early 10th century in the British Isles, where fresh-faced 10-year-old Prince Amleth (Oscar Novak) is destined to succeed his father King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke). But Aurvandil’s troublemaking brother Fjolnir (Claes Bang) wreaks murderous havoc on that plan, carrying Amleth’s mother Gudrun off like a prize. (She’s played by Nicole Kidman, in a marvelous crimped mane à la Studio 54.) Young Amleth escapes the violence, vowing revenge, and after growing into the beefy form of Alexander Skarsgard, sets out to get it.

He also makes sweet love to saucy enslaved girl Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy), and has a hallucinatory meeting with a blind seer ( Björk ) who urges him not to stray from his mission. Eggers, too, takes his mission seriously, at times fulfilling it with unintentionally comical solemnity. “Your sword is long!” exclaims one of the Viking womenfolk as she gazes upon Amleth’s ancestral iron weapon. Still, there’s always something to look at in this cracked magisterial landscape of moss and mud and angry volcanoes. The Northman, whether you approach it as legitimate folklore or as a testosterone-fueled Saturday-afternoon lark, speaks to the 10-year-old boy in all of us, with a loud and mighty Viking burp.

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The Northman review – Robert Eggers’s ambitious, preposterous Viking epic

Understatement is not on the menu as Alexander Skarsgård scorches through a mission of bloody vengeance in this oddly plodding Scandi saga

T he American director Robert Eggers established himself as a singular cinematic voice with the chilling 17th-century “New England Folktale” The Witch , and followed it up with The Lighthouse , an immersive dream of mermaids and murder. Both movies had an atmosphere you could taste , and made virtues of their relatively low budgets, conjuring expansive worlds from meagre resources.

Enter The Northman , a Viking epic, its budget reportedly in excess of $70m, that comes on like a head-smashing mashup of Beo wulf , Hamlet (Eggers and Shakespeare share a Scandinavian legend source) and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising , told in growly tones that are more Dark Knight than Green Knight. Co-written with Icelandic poet Sjón , and described by Eggers as an attempt to make “the definitive Viking movie”, it’s as ambitious as it is preposterous and, at times, ponderous – filled with garbled epithets about vengeance and fate that are whispered, muttered, or blood-curdlingly yelled. This is a story of children “born of savagery”, in which tormented men spurn happiness to dive into icy waters in search of a fight, while mothers-to-be howl like banshees at the gods; a story with chapters that take place “Years Later”, and that lead us to “The Gates of Hell”. Understatement is not on the menu.

We open in the Orkney/Shetland-adjacent fictional kingdom of Hrafnsey in AD895, Here, King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) is murdered by his half-brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang) in front of his young son, Amleth (Oscar Novak), who then witnesses his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), being carried off screaming. “I will avenge you father; I will save you mother; I will kill you Fjölnir!” becomes the battle cry of Amleth, who grows up to become an iron-hearted berserker, played with muscular vulnerability by Alexander Skarsgård , in the land of Rus. An impressive extended shot (one of many) tracks an intoxicated raid on a Slavic village, delivering axes in heads (characters in The Northman are identified by missing parts of their faces) as poultry flap in the background amid Pythonesque mud.

An encounter with a visionary seeress (an elaborately headdressed Björk) sets Amleth on a roundabout course to Iceland, branding himself a slave in order to infiltrate his uncle’s circle. On arrival, he headbutts a man to a pulp while playing a sport that looks like a cross between quidditch and rollerball, thereby winning the approval of his estranged mother, who is now living with Fjölnir. It’s an arrangement she seems to enjoy, although Amleth knows she’s just acting – and there’s a lot of acting in The Northman: some pouty, some scowly, some beefy, some shouty – all delivered in the film’s occasionally ridiculous Nordic-sounding English language (shades of The Last Duel ’s accent salads). Amleth also acquires an Arthurian-style blade that can only be unsheathed under foretold circumstances, and teams up with Olga ( The Witch’ s breakout star, Anya Taylor-Joy), who tells him: “Your strength breaks men’s bones. I have the cunning to break their minds.”

Eggers has always had an astute eye for that strange crossover between this world and the next, mixing earthy tactility with otherworldly dreams in impressively matter-of-fact fashion. That quality is to the fore in The Northman , which at times reminded me of the living comic-book aesthetic of Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City , not least when the monochrome noir of night-time exteriors is broken by the golden glow of firelit interiors – a key motif.

Yet for all its visual coups (breathtaking scenery, evocatively captured by cinematographer Jarin Blaschke) and multilayered soundtrack (composers Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough place us right there in the landscape), there’s something oddly plodding about Amleth’s bloody mission. While the Norns-of-fate narrative may contrive several reversals of fortune and sympathy, there’s little of the genuinely uncanny weirdness that made Eggers’s first two features such a treat. What madness lies herein is not of the north-northwest variety but more in keeping with the bonkers blockbuster spectacle of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah .

In last week’s Observer , Eggers spoke of the pressure to deliver “ the most entertaining Robert Eggers movie I could make ”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the result feels uncharacteristically familiar as it marauds toward a final act pitched somewhere between Conan the Barbarian and Anakin’s last moments from Revenge of the Sith , with just a hint of the manly fireside wrestling of Women in Love . The end result could happily play on a double bill with either Zardoz or Thor . Whether that will prove a strength or a weakness with the all-important multiplex audiences remains to be seen.

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In Praise of The Northman ’s Ruthless Unrelatability

Nicole Kidman plays a Norse queen whose husband is murdered and who ends up married to the murderer, her former brother-in-law. In Hamlet , she’d be Gertrude, but in the The Northman , which takes for its source material the brawnier, grislier legend on which the Shakespeare play is based, she’s named Gudrún, and she’s slung over the shoulder of her still-bloody new spouse Fjölnir (Claes Bang) and carried off as the spoils of fratricide. Watching from a hiding spot, her young son Amleth adds to the murderous to-do list as he flees into the night muttering, “I will avenge you, Father. I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir.” And yet, when he makes his way back to Gudrún as an adult played by a hulking Alexander Skarsgård, Amleth is thrown to discover that his mother appears to be happy with Fjölnir, with whom she’s since had a son. She challenges Amleth’s assumption that it was Fjölnir she needed to be rescued from, showing him the slave brand on her chest and taunting him for believing his parents’ marriage was actually the fairy-tale joining of noble families he’d been told.

Kidman’s a scream in The Northman , and in a revisionist take on its tale, Gudrún would be a tragic feminist anti-heroine trying to engineer a life she wants from her unwilling perch in a society shaped around what she describes as savagery. But in this film, she’s practically demonic in that moment, a degenerate flying in the face of the particular Viking social order Amleth has dedicated himself to restoring. It’s not that her desires are unsympathetic — on the contrary, Gudrún, with her thoughts on good leadership and her desire to choose a caring mate, may be more relatable than any other character in the film. But relatability is the last thing on The Northman ’s mind. The film is the third from writer-director Robert Eggers, who shares a screenplay credit here with the Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón. And like Eggers’s previous work, it’s interested in not just re-creating the details and texture of a past era but also its way of thinking. The Northman is a gloriously ruthless saga involving sorcery, the immutability of fate, sackings and stormy journeys at sea and a nude sword fight in the shadow of a volcano. But its most notable quality is the way it refuses to bend its characters to the present, preferring instead to make them as alien in their perspective as possible. The Northman doesn’t invite its viewers into its world, but instead dares them to try to catch up.

There’s an inevitable distancing effect to this approach, though that’s refreshing into itself. Eggers’s debut feature, The Witch , strove to re-create the world as seen by its Puritan colonists — not just in the minutiae of their desperate efforts to carve survival for themselves out of the unforgiving wilderness, but in their certainty that the Devil was real and present and actively working against them in tangible ways. The Northman may be about the familiar motivation of revenge, but it’s even more remote in its belief system. Amleth’s father, King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), talks about how shameful it would be to grow old instead of dying in battle and ascending to Valhalla. Amleth is named his successor in a ceremony in which he pretends to be a dog, laps up a hallucinogenic potion, and sees a vision of his ancestors’ bodies hanging from a tree. As a grimy grown-up striated with muscles and with shoulders so broad they seem to weigh him down — no one has ever been more born for a role than Skarsgård was for this one — Amleth becomes a berserker, slaughtering his way with unpretty skill through a Rus village, then meandering indifferently through the aftermath of raping and pillaging like a retail worker who’s finally off the clock. When he encounters a seeress played by Björk, one of several witches he meets along the way, she reasonably points out that he’s been terrorizing her people and then reminds him of his avowed mission anyway, as though his fate were simply bigger than the day-to-day lives of the villagers being rounded up to be sold for labor.

“These savages make for fine chattel,” Amleth’s cohort observes in one of the screenplay’s balder moments. Savagery is in the eye of the beholder, and The Northman is fiercely committed to rooting itself in a particular perspective, even when Amleth meets a wily Rus captive, Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), who becomes his ally and his lover. When so much recent media has bent history to accommodate more modern points of view, there’s something spectacular about Eggers’s refusal to soften his protagonist in any way or to have him learn the sort of lessons a 2022 story demands. You don’t need to understand Amleth’s values to invest in his brutal journey, which is filled with heart-pounding set pieces and unabashed badassery — I was partial to the moment he casually catches a spear hurled down at him from the battlements and then tosses it back. The Northman benefits from surrendering to that sense of remove, to its hero’s unforgiving understanding of the universe having been created to reward violence. You wouldn’t want to see him striding up to the walls of your settlement, but hard-core moments like the one in which Amleth disguises himself as a slave are easy to appreciate. He doesn’t just pick up an iron from the fire and use it to brand his own skin; he mutters to the tool that, should he meet its owner, “I will thank him for the warmth you gave to me.” Metal!

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Movie Reviews

Review: robert eggers' 'the northman' is 2+ hours of art-house savagery.

Bob Mondello

The legend that Shakespeare based Hamlet on has inspired another work: Robert Eggers' violent new film, The Northman.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The film "The Northman" is a tale of Vikings and carnage. It stars a bulked-up Alexander Skarsgard, and critic Bob Mondello says with a $90 million budget, it marks a startling change of pace for its arthouse director.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: As the 10th-century Viking ship pulls into the muddy, desolate shore, young Amleth...

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE NORTHMAN")

OSCAR NOVAK: (As Young Amleth) He's here.

MONDELLO: ...Is thrilled.

OSCAR: (As Young Amleth) Mother, father is here.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) The king, milady, the king.

MONDELLO: The king is just as pleased, eager to take his young prince through a drug-fuelled rite of passage, preparing his ascent to the throne.

ETHAN HAWKE: (As King Aurvandil War-Raven) How I've missed you, my son. One day, this kingdom will be yours.

MONDELLO: One day, but not this day. Uncle Fjolnir has designs on the throne and on the queen. As little Amleth catches snowflakes on his tongue, an arrow whizzes by, lodging itself in the king's chest and an unroyal uncle approaches, sword drawn.

HAWKE: (As King Aurvandil War-Raven) Strike, brother, strike but know that bearing a stolen ring makes no half-breed a king.

MONDELLO: As Amleth runs away, he makes a vow.

OSCAR: (As Young Amleth) I will avenge you, Father. I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjolnir.

MONDELLO: When Shakespeare adapted this same legend about a Scandinavian prince whose uncle kills his father and marries his mother, he took the H at the end of Amleth and put it at the front. He also gave the Prince Hamlet existential doubts and soliloquies about shuffling off this mortal coil. The movie's prince, by contrast, isn't much worried about being or not being. He grows up a man of action, of serious muscles and of few, if oft repeated, words...

ALEXANDER SKARSGARD: (As Amleth) I will avenge you, Father. I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjolnir.

MONDELLO: Because what's a guy to do when there's something rotten in the pre-state of Denmark. Played by Alexander Skarsgard, Amleth is a bull of a man, neck bulging as he catches a spear in midair that's just missed his head and hurls it back at defenders of a town he's about to sack. He wears the head of a wolf and is animalistic, whether knocking heads together or hooking up with Olga, the film's witchy but practical Ophelia figure.

ANYA TAYLOR-JOY: (As Olga of the Birch Forest) Your strength breaks men's bones. I have the cunning to break their minds.

MONDELLO: If this be madness, yet there is method in't. As echoes of Shakespeare pile up and Willem Dafoe's unlucky jester even gets a Yorick's skull moment, Olga centers Amleth, keeps him focused.

SKARSGARD: (As Amleth) It's a nightmare.

TAYLOR-JOY: (As Olga of the Birch Forest) Then you must wake up.

MONDELLO: There's the rub. Awake, all is vengeance. To sleep, perchance to dream might well be worse. Director Robert Eggers makes "The Northman" a waking cinematic nightmare - mayhem filmed in breathtaking continuous shots, emotions pitched on the far side of sanity, supernatural elements as real to the characters as breathing.

SKARSGARD: (As Amleth) For now I will haunt this farm like a hungry corpse returned from the grave.

MONDELLO: The director's visuals are also designed to haunt, including a fight to the death atop an erupting volcano, all in the service of a story far grander than his last film, the intimate black and white "The Lighthouse," which had just two men in a cramped interior. "The Northman" has hundreds of marauding warriors, Nicole Kidman as a supremely devious queen and Bjork haunting the rugged slopes of Iceland as a blind seeress.

BJORK: (As Seeress) Even though your brother stole my eyes, I see you.

MONDELLO: Eggers has researched 10th-century Nordic life as few filmmakers before him, the way spirits and drug-fueled visions were accepted as part of the real world, the trance-like fury of berserker warriors. And that makes all of this play more authentically than you might expect and more fantastically, too, in ways that have everything to do with big-screen showmanship.

SKARSGARD: (As Amleth) I cannot escape my fate.

MONDELLO: Eggers makes "The Northman" as crafty as an art film, as brutal as a slasher flick - two-plus hours of arthouse savagery. I'm Bob Mondello.

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The northman, common sense media reviewers.

Powerful, incredibly bloody, vengeance-fueled Viking saga.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Although entire movie is a quest for revenge, the

Characters are mainly seeking violence and revenge

Driving force comes from White males (no notable n

Extremely strong, gory violence. Long, bloody batt

Woman's naked bottom. Several men and women appear

Infrequent use of "bastard," "bitch," "whore," "he

Characters eat a mushroom stew and go on "bad trip

Parents need to know that The Northman is a bloody Viking revenge epic starring Nicole Kidman, Alexander Skarsgård, and Anya Taylor-Joy. It's powerfully and expertly made by director Robert Eggers but has intense, mature violence and sexual situations. Expect gory battle scenes; characters being hit with…

Positive Messages

Although entire movie is a quest for revenge, the story eventually begins to show revenge's downsides: the violence, hate, and cyclical nature of it.

Positive Role Models

Characters are mainly seeking violence and revenge and ways to usurp power or gain control over others. While a lesson is learned, it's too late.

Diverse Representations

Driving force comes from White males (no notable non-White characters), but women have more power and agency here than women used to in movies like this. Women here make their own choices, exert their own power.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Extremely strong, gory violence. Long, bloody battles, fighting, hitting, bashing with weapons, head-butts, etc. Many bloody wounds. Fighters slathered in blood. Characters pierced with arrows, stabbed with swords, impaled with axes. A man rips another man's throat open with his teeth. Throat slicing. Severed heads. Bashed-in faces. Person's nose sliced off; mutilated face. Plucked-out eyes. Mutilated corpses hung from wall. Corpses with hearts carved out. Spilled intestines. Child stabbed (off-screen). Character attacked by dog, dog killed. Horse beheaded. Man stabs himself. Corpses hanging from trees. Naked male corpse. People bound in chains; depictions of slavery. Families are forcibly separated, with screaming young children taken from their parents. Woman hog-tied. Women roughly grabbed. Intense, eerie, nightmarish rituals. Scary stuff: witches, ghosts, the undead. Homes on fire. Vomiting. Incest. Rape is mentioned, and a man tries to have forced sex with an enslaved woman. In a group sex scene, it appears that some men might be forcibly grabbing women.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Woman's naked bottom. Several men and women appear to be having sex during a celebration, with kissing, thrusting, caressing of bottoms, obscured nudity in the shadows, partial bottoms and partial breasts seen, etc. Kissing. Suggestion of incest. Brief shot of a woman dressing, with a gown sliding down over her body. Crude, sex-related humor. Sex-related dialogue. Shirtless males. Naked male corpse. Woman lifts dress to reveal that she's menstruating; brief shot of blood. (Content related to sexual violence is in the "Violence" section.)

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Infrequent use of "bastard," "bitch," "whore," "hell," "swine," "piss."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters eat a mushroom stew and go on "bad trips." Social drinking in taverns.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Northman is a bloody Viking revenge epic starring Nicole Kidman , Alexander Skarsgård , and Anya Taylor-Joy . It's powerfully and expertly made by director Robert Eggers but has intense, mature violence and sexual situations. Expect gory battle scenes; characters being hit with arrows, swords, and axes; a man ripping another man's throat with his teeth; severed heads, mutilated faces, and mutilated corpses; and the suggested deaths of a child, dog, horse, and more. Families are forcibly separated. Several characters appear to have sex -- and some women appear to be forcibly grabbed -- with thrusting, touching, and partial bare bottoms and breasts seen. A man tries to rape an enslaved woman; she deters him by lifting her dress and showing him her menstrual blood. There are other sexual situations and sex-related dialogue, as well as uses of "bastard," "bitch," "whore," "hell," "swine," and "piss." Characters eat a "magic" mushroom stew and go on "bad trips," and there's social drinking in taverns. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (3)
• Kids say (8)

Based on 3 parent reviews

Definitely not for children or teens

One of the most solid films i have seen in a long time, what's the story.

Loosely inspired by Shakespeare's Hamlet , THE NORTHMAN opens in the year 895, with King Aurvandill War-Raven ( Ethan Hawke ) returning home to his wife, Queen Gudrún ( Nicole Kidman ), and young son, Amleth (Oscar Novak), after a long voyage. The king's brother, Fjölnir ( Claes Bang ), arrives and betrays him, assassinating him in a sneak attack. Amleth sees his mother being kidnapped and flees, vowing revenge. Years later, he has become a fearsome Viking ( Alexander Skarsgård ). When Amleth encounters a witch and learns Fjölnir's location, he disguises himself as an enslaved person and boards a ship for Iceland. He meets a healer named Olga ( Anya Taylor-Joy ) and forms an unexpected bond with her. Forced to labor on a remote farm, Amleth meets another witch and is told the location of a magic sword. With the sword, Amleth begins to carry out his revenge, killing Fjölnir's men one by one. But before he battles Fjölnir himself in a fiery showdown, Amleth must face a terrible truth -- and make an impossible decision.

Is It Any Good?

Director Robert Eggers has created a powerful saga full of passion, rage, and dark fantasy. As with his remarkable debut feature The Witch , Eggers seems to have poured a ton of research into The Northman , as well as teaming with veteran Icelandic writer Sjón ( Lamb ) to capture an eerie authenticity. It feels like being transported back in time, rather than watching actors in costumes. Even though there's actually little going on here outside of a revenge plot, the movie has weight to it, something at stake. It feels like it was created by people who take pride in their craft.

Recalling David Lowery's entrancing The Green Knight , The Northman switches with ease from earthy battle sequences slippery with mud and gore to unreal sequences of witches or Valkyries, all belonging to the same world. Yet as he proved with his previous movie, The Lighthouse , Eggers is equally skilled with actors and characters. The performances here are all impressive, but Kidman in particular can be so ferocious and startling that her work may feel like an actual sting. As for the overarching revenge plot, it does take 137 minutes to march toward the inevitable. But once it gets there, it does so with a surprisingly primal, visual palette, and it also manages to show the act as an exhausting, ever spiraling curse without end.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Northman 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How is sex depicted in the movie? Which moments are problematic? Why? Have values changed since the time of the Vikings?

Why do you think Amleth ultimately chose revenge? Why might it have been extremely difficult for him to choose love and healing instead? Why is it difficult for us to pursue things we haven't been exposed to?

What's the appeal of Viking stories? What can we learn from that time and place?

How are women represented in the movie? Do they have their own agency and power?

Movie Details

• In theaters : April 22, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : May 13, 2022
• Cast : Alexander Skarsgard , Anya Taylor-Joy , Nicole Kidman
• Director : Robert Eggers
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Latino actors
• Studio : Focus Features
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Magic and Fantasy
• Run time : 137 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong bloody violence, some sexual content and nudity
• Last updated : April 1, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

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The Northman review: Fear the reaper, when he is Skarsgård

Indie filmmaker Robert Eggers (The Witch) makes a play for the multiplex in his starry, bloody Viking epic.

Recently, a small ripple ran through social media when a series of posters for The Northman materialized in New York City subways with the title missing , a printing error that the internet reacted to with predictable glee. Some made quick work of Photoshop , slapping on winky stand-ins ( Tarzan , Finding Nemo 3 ); others tried more sincerely to provide their own loglines ("Like Waterworld 2 or something. Post-apocalyptic, but it's tribal." "Vikings? Vikings who are going through a really tough time.")

The Northman (in theaters April 22) is in fact a tough time for Vikings, though it's arguable whether they ever had any other kind. It is also, beneath the arthouse sheen of A24 and the raft of prestige weirdos — Anya Taylor-Joy , Willem Dafoe , Björk — on board, a fairly straightforward genre movie: A blood-soaked revenge saga somewhere between Clint Eastwood, Conan the Barbarian , and The Clan of the Cave Bear , with a heady glaze of metaphysical fantasy.

That it was made by writer-director Robert Eggers , who also helmed the 2015 Sundance fever dream The Witch and 2019's surreal sea-shanty chamber piece The Lighthouse , is less expected, though his imprint is all over the film — in its grand monologues and strange mythologies, the baroque, uncanny sense of world-building. What's less clear this time is whether any of it means anything, or is even really supposed to.

Alexander Skarsgård at least seems born to play Amleth, the deposed ninth-century warrior-prince whose betrayal as a child at the hands of his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang) leaves him shorn of both his parents ( Nicole Kidman and Ethan Hawke ) and his North Atlantic kingdom. Conscripted into a roving band of mercenaries who storm villages, leaving scorch marks and pillage in their wake, his purpose hardens, "a freezing river of hate." And news that his usurper still lives — now an exile himself, somewhere in Iceland — offers the cosmic chance at retribution he's spent years preparing for. To reach Fjölnir, he'll need to draft himself onto a slave ship with other chattel of war, though he isn't the only one there with no plans to surrender; Taylor-Joy's ferocious, flaxen-haired concubine Olga has, she tells him serenely, her own powers of persuasion beyond the sword.

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. Skarsgård, deltoids rippling, infers the damaged soul beneath his marauding slaughter-wolf, and a restless volcano lords over them all, burbling witness to the rivers of blood and ritual chaos below. In all that, the script, by Eggers and Icelandic screenwriter Sjón ( Lamb ), serves mostly as bare scaffolding for the film's ravishing vistas and flamboyant violence, neither profound nor particularly important. Beneath the runes and visions, it's a tale as old as Game of Thrones , and as simple as a story told around a campfire: a ride of the Valkyries spelled out in gore and popcorn. Grade: B

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Boy Kills World review: "A gleefully bonkers blend of The Hunger Games and The Raid"

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Bill kills in a Sam Raimi production that’s probably best partnered with a non-anatomical six-pack.

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Do the Skarsgård brothers share the same trainer? You have to wonder given Bill Skarsgård’s shredded physique in Moritz Mohr’s gonzo actioner, a muscular morphosis to match his older sibling Alexander’s uber-ripped build in  The Northman . 

A gleefully bonkers blend of  The Hunger Games  and  The Raid  (one that features the latter’s martial arts maven Yayan Ruhian in a leading role), Boy Kills World centers on a deaf orphan on a one-man mission to avenge himself on the totalitarian regime he blames for offing his family. Skarsgård’s Boy lets his brawn do the talking – or he would, were his every move not accompanied by H. Jon Benjamin (of Bob’s Burgers fame) as an inner voice modeled on the narrator of Boy’s favorite childhood video game.

As that precis suggests, Boy Kills World is a film where anything pretty much goes. A live TV show where dissidents are executed by a breakfast cereal’s costumed mascots? Sure. Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery as a murderous enforcer? Hell, why not? Gory fight scenes utilizing everything from cheese graters to Gatling guns as weapons? Bring it on. And while we’re at it, let’s have a lip-reading gag involving a growling rebel (Isaiah Mustafa) whose every utterance Boy garbles into gibberish ('Dodo buns!').

OK, so there does come a point when the wackiness gets wearying. Yet it's hard to deny that Boy Kills World has a delirious, unhinged energy to it that’s not all that dissimilar to the John Wick franchise – a series Skarsgård exited, rather abruptly, at the end of its  fourth chapter .

Boy Kills World is in US theaters and UK cinemas on April 26. 

For more, check out our guides to all the other upcoming movies on the way in 2024 and beyond as well as the best action movies of all time.

Neil Smith is a freelance film critic who has written for several publications, including Total Film. His bylines can be found at the BBC, Film 4 Independent, Uncut Magazine, SFX Magazine, Heat Magazine, Popcorn, and more. 

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Dev Patel’s ‘Monkey Man’ Is Now Available to Watch at Home!

After pulling in $28 million at the worldwide box office this month, director (and star) Dev Patel’s critically acclaimed action-thriller Monkey Man is now available to watch at home.

You can rent Monkey Man for $19.99 or digitally purchase the film for $24.99!

Monkey Man is currently 88% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes , with Bloody Disgusting’s head critic Meagan Navarro awarding the film 4.5/5 stars in her review out of SXSW back in March.

Meagan raves, “ While the violence onscreen is palpable and painful, it’s not just the exquisite fight choreography and thrilling action set pieces that set Monkey Man apart but also its political consciousness, unique narrative structure, and myth-making scale.”

“While Monkey Man  pays tribute to all of the action genre’s greats, from the Indonesian action classics to Korean revenge cinema and even a  John Wick joke or two, Dev Patel’s cultural spin and unique narrative structure leave behind all influences in the dust for new terrain,” Meagan’s review continues.

She adds, “ Monkey Man presents Dev Patel as a new action hero, a tenacious underdog with a penetrating stare who bites, bludgeons, and stabs his way through bodies to gloriously bloody excess. More excitingly, the film introduces Patel as a strong visionary right out of the gate.”

Inspired by the legend of Hanuman , Monkey Man stars Patel as Kid, an anonymous young man who ekes out a meager living in an underground fight club where, night after night, wearing a gorilla mask, he is beaten bloody by more popular fighters for cash. After years of suppressed rage, Kid discovers a way to infiltrate the enclave of the city’s sinister elite. As his childhood trauma boils over, his mysteriously scarred hands unleash an explosive campaign of retribution to settle the score with the men who took everything from him.

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Danny Boyle  and  Alex Garland  ( Annihilation ,  Men ), the director and writer behind 2002’s hit horror film  28 Days Later , are reteaming for the long-awaited sequel,  28 Years Later . THR reports that the sequel has cast Jodie Comer ( Alone in the Dark , “Killing Eve”), Aaron Taylor-Johnson ( Kraven the Hunter ), and Ralph Fiennes ( The Menu ).

The plan is for Garland to write  28 Years Later and Boyle to direct, with Garland also planning on writing at least one more sequel to the franchise – director Nia DaCosta is currently in talks to helm the second installment.

No word on plot details as of this time, or who Comer, Taylor-Johnson, and Fiennes may play.

28 Days Later  received a follow up in 2007 with  28 Weeks Later , which was executive produced by Boyle and Garland but directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. Now, the pair hope to launch a new trilogy with  28 Years Later . The plan is for Garland to write all three entries, with Boyle helming the first installment.

Boyle and Garland will also produce alongside original producer Andrew Macdonald and Peter Rice, the former head of Fox Searchlight Pictures, the division of one-time studio Twentieth Century Fox that originally backed the British-made movie and its sequel.

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Cillian Murphy ( Oppenheimer ) is on board as executive producer, though the actor isn’t set to appear in the film…yet.

Talks of a third installment in the franchise have been coming and going for the last several years now – at one point, it was going to be titled  28 Months Later – but it looks like this one is finally getting off the ground here in 2024 thanks to this casting news. Stay tuned for more updates soon!

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