Tag: Robert Eggers

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The Northman

Alexander Skarsgaard as Amleth in The Northman.

Hamlet is William Shakespeare’s most dissected play, and arguably the greatest work of literature in the English language — despite the fact that it is set not in England, but in Denmark. The texts the Bard was drawing on were already 400 years old when he was writing at the turn of the 17th century, but the story of Amleth, the Viking prince who seeks revenge after his uncle murders his father and marries his mother, is believed to be much older. The original saga is lost to history, but it probably came from Iceland around 900 CE. 

The Northman, directed by Robert Eggers and written by the Icelandic poet and musician Sjón, is on some level an attempt to reconstruct that lost story. At times, you can be forgiven if you think it seems like an attempt to adapt Hamlet as a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. But one thing is for sure: This is the most Viking work of art in the last thousand years or so. 

How Viking are we talking? Burley men raise drinking horns to their liege in fire-lit mead halls. Longboats ferry warriors to raid and pillage. Priests of Odin whip berserkers into a murderous frenzy with guttural death metal chants. It’s constantly snowing, but people are half naked anyway. There are literal dogs of war, and they are literally let slip. A dead hero is set adrift on a burning boat. There’s sex in a volcanic hot spring. Nicole Kidman threatens to eat someone’s heart. Björk instructs the hero on how to acquire a magic sword by fighting an undead barrow-wight. We see Yggdrasil the World Tree framed by the Northern Lights. And, of course, valkyries appear to ride the spirits of dead warriors to Valhalla. 

This is not the sanitized, horned-helmet-wearing, Marvel comics Thor vision of Viking-hood. This is blood and mud and ice and pagan gods, and, reader, I am here for it. 

Björk taking the Viking thing to the next level.

We meet young Prince Amleth (Oscar Novak) when his father Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) returns from plundering the English Coast. The fight was hard, and the king sports a nasty sword wound that has him thinking about his mortality. Against the objections of his mother Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), Aurvandil decides to initiate Amleth into manhood, so he can be prepared to take his place on the throne if and when the king dies in battle. The ceremony, in which the father and son ingest a psychedelic tea brewed by the shaman/fool Heimir (a gloriously crazed Willem Dafoe), is the first taste of just how bonkers this movie is going to get. 

Turns out, Aurvandil was prescient. As they’re leaving the ceremony, the king is bushwhacked by his brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang), and young Amleth escapes by sea. As he rows away, he chants his new checklist: 1. Avenge father, 2. rescue mother, 3. kill uncle. 

Years later, Amleth has grown into the extremely healthy form of Alexander Skarsgard, whose ab muscles ripple from pulling longboat oars. He’s pillaging with a band of berserkers operating in the land of the Kievan Rus, which is now known as Ukraine. There, he meets a seeress (Björk) who tells him Fjölnir almost immediately lost his kingdom and fled to Iceland, where he has set up a new settlement with Gudrún at his side. Ameth stows away on a ship bound for Iceland disguised as a slave, and meets the gloriously named Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy), a Slavic sorceress who pledges to help him seek revenge in return for her freedom. 

Alexander Skarsgard and Anya Taylor-Joy plot revenge.

Eggers creates worlds that follow the mythology of their inhabitants while also offering sly comment on said mythology. Like the Puritan patriarch in The Witch, the evil Fjölnir is exposed as an incompetent braggart. When his men discover a group of warriors slain by the rampaging Amleth, they are convinced their “savage” Christian enemies must be behind it, because “their god is a corpse nailed to a tree” — never mind that we’ve just spent the last 90 minutes watching these “civilized” Norsemen rape and pillage everything in sight.  Ultimately, everyone is doomed not by their predetermined fates, but by their belief that fate is predetermined.

Eggers is a director with a vision who has been given the kind of budget that lets him explore the outer limits of his talent, and he does not throw away his shot. The Northman is a living, breathing, spitting, farting, blood-spurting trip to cinematic Valhalla. 

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Film Features Film/TV

The Witch

Every year around Halloween, I get a hankering for Hammer horror. Atmospheric films like The Gorgon or Christopher Lee’s Dracula, made before slasher pictures gave the genre a bloody sameness, have a certain pleasing gothic creepiness that transcends their screenplay and acting faults. The Witch, which won Robert Eggers a directing award at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, seems like it was created out of the Platonic ideal of a Hammer-period horror film, with all of the creep and none of the camp.

It begins with a family of five being expelled from an unnamed New England plantation that looks a lot like Salem circa 1690. The cause of the schism is some obscure doctrinal dispute between the family patriarch William (Ralph Ineson) and the town council of puritans led by the Governor (Julian Richings). Significantly, it is William who denounces the townspeople as being insufficiently pure, claiming his family are the only ones who practice true Christianity.

Ellie Grainger, Black Phillip the Satanic goat, and Lucas Dawson struggle to survive.

William takes his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie), daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), tween son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), elementary-aged twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson), and infant Samuel into the forest to build a new life for themselves where they can worship free from the corrupting influences of the world. But the woods they chose for their new home already has an inhabitant: a shapeshifting witch played in various forms by Bathsheba Garnett and Sarah Stephens.

A card at the end of the film notes that it was based on historical accounts of witchcraft trials from the late seventeenth century, when there weren’t any witches with magical powers, just women whom the patriarchy had deemed too unimportant to feed and who used the magical thinking of theology to justify getting rid of. But there’s no doubt black magic is real in the world of The Witch: No sooner has the family built their farm than the witch snatches baby Samuel in the midst of a peekaboo game with Thomasin, grinds him up, bathes in his innocent blood, and goes for a flight on her broomstick.

The family is grief-stricken, with the burden falling heaviest on the mother, Katherine, who struggles to stay upright as conditions on the farm worsen. The crops are failing, and the animals are either getting sick, or, in the case of the huge goat named Black Phillip, developing a Satanic mean streak. Suspicion falls on Thomasin, the beautiful young daughter who is coming of age and inadvertently tempting her little brother with lustful thoughts. Taylor-Joy is riveting as the noose tightens around her, causing herself to question her own innocence. The high point of her performance comes when, pressured by her father to give a false confession, she snaps and suggests that maybe the reason why his farm is failing and his kids are dying is that he’s an arrogant religious nut who sucks at farming and is generally unprepared for the harsh life of the frontier.

Anya Taylor-Joy as accused witch Thomasin

From the safe and rationalist point of view of the 21st century, that sounds like a pretty accurate description of the conditions surrounding the Salem witch trials, but The Witch’s point of view is stuck firmly in the puritanical 17th century, where witches are real and want to do the devil’s bidding by messing with good Christians. The Witch of the Woods sinks her talons deep in William and systematically deprives him of everything he holds dear. It’s an epic slow burn that makes flawless use of the film’s 93-minute running time. Like the ornate Hammer films of the early 1960s, the production design puts us in the characters’ world from the beginning, but Eggers is going for a strict realism that makes the magical elements more creepy and unnerving. The low-light photography of Jarin Blaschke, such as the extended sequence around a tense dinner table lit only by dripping, homemade candles, takes a page from Kubrick’s groundbreaking work on Barry Lyndon and transforms the domestic scene into a Dutch Masters painting.

The controlled, almost serene pacing of The Witch goes against the grain of contemporary horror, but, taken with work like last year’s instant classic It Follows, it seems to point toward a new subgenre of arthouse horror. For fans of the creepy, it’s the year’s first must-see movie.