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

polygon.com:

The Witch andThe Lighthousedirector 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