Northman big, brawling and beautiful

The Northman

(R16, 137 mins) Directed by Robert Eggers

***1⁄2

Reviewed by

MGraeme Tuckett

aybe it’s my own fault, for having a childhood punctuated by regular screenings of Monty Python and the Holy Grail on the VHS machine we kept next to the phonograph and the anvil, that I can’t sit through a film opening with a stormy sky and a graphic that reads ‘‘895AD’’ without immediately adding ‘‘Tuesday . . . Just After Lunch’’ in my head. And then laughing.

After which, any movie which hopes to be taken seriously is a lost cause to Mrs Tuckett’s boy Graeme.

And yet, I don’t think I’m going to be the only one openly snorting at The Northman. You’ll love it, or you’ll laugh at it. Or both.

The Northman is the third film from New York-based tyro Robert Eggers. After breaking out with the art-house smash The Witch, which made a star of Anya Taylor-Joy, Eggers moved onto the Poe-esque stylings of The Lighthouse, which saw Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe getting Jung at heart as lighthouse keepers driven mad by storms, whisky and beasties – although not necessarily in that order.

The Northman sees Eggers back in the past – he’s already referred to as a ‘‘historical filmmaker’’ – with his familiar themes of madness, jealousy, a dash of the supernatural and lashings of bloody death.

In the aforementioned 895, Amleth is a prince, who as a young boy, saw his father murdered by his uncle and is now plotting vengeance, having had the great good fortune to grow up to be Alexander Skarsgard.

Which, by the look of Skarsgard’s shoulders and chest, is going to come in handy if there is sword-fighting and half-naked wrestling to be done. This particular Viking clan are clearly brilliant at forging axes and swords, but have yet to master the art of making a shirt that stays on.

The adult Amleth gets himself enslaved by his uncle’s family – none of whom recognise him beneath the permanent scowl and gym-bro physique – and sets about rising up the ranks until he can get close enough to extract his utu.

Along the way there will be witches (again), a lot of grunting and howling, a couple of very dubious fortune tellers – hanging out in smoky caves for no obvious reason – and a late switch-back in the storytelling that at least made me respect that Eggers had found a way to make The Northman into something less predictable than the humourless, poo-stained Gladiator clone it was threatening to be.

Still, at two hours and 17 minutes, Eggers had to find something for Skarsgard to do other than running around in his battle-panties swearing vengeance for his dad every 10 minutes or so like some Scandinavian Inigo Montoya, but without the wardrobe, wit or charm.

Among the distractingly wellknown cast, Willem Dafoe and Bjork show up as witches, Ethan Hawke is dad, Danish superstar Claes Bang is the murderous uncle and Taylor-Joy returns the favour as a Slavic prisoner with an accent that slides around northern Europe like a migrating gannet. Even Nicole Kidman appears, as Amleth’s muchconflicted mum.

Kidman, as ever, is fine. It just feels wrong that she is here, blamelessly clean and wellgroomed, like a ballerina rehearsing in an abattoir.

The trouble with having faces as famous as Kidman and Hawke is that it stops The Northman being the immersive experience it needs to be.

Those bankable names were maybe necessary to get the film made, yet they make The Northman a worse film than it would have been with hardworking unknowns.

The rest of the cast are pretty much indistinguishable beneath the beards, blood and dung, mostly looking like an admirably committed mosh-pit at a Beastwars gig.

The Northman is one of those films in which people speak in quote marks.

All the dialogue does here is explain which beardy bloke is angry and why, before devolving into a lot of – actual – howling and barking.

If you’ve seen Hamlet (or, more perfectly, The Lion King) then you already know what’s coming – and why.

A quest for a magical sword is announced at around the onehour mark, feeling like an unnecessary detour from the storyline – and which adds nothing to the film that any lump of pointy iron couldn’t have accomplished.

As always in ‘‘historical’’ blokey epics, there is a lot of unresolved childhood trauma floating around – and a hilarious suspicion that a half-decent school counsellor could have made the entire genre redundant with a cup of Milo and a chat. I guess we’ll never know.

But, for all the nonsense The Northman trails in its wake, this is also a big, brawling and absolutely beautifully shot and scored film. I still liked it a great deal, even though I laughed from beginning to end. Thanks mum and dad.

The Northman is now screening in cinemas nationwide.