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.
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.
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.