The Northman

“The Northman” is the story of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgrd), the son of King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke), who is betrayed by his brother, Fjölnir (Claes Bang). Amleth flees his homeland, vowing to avenge his father, save his mother, and assassinate Fjölnir ...

The Seeress, in particular, is a prophet who sees everything that will happen, so she is assisting Amleth not because he is a Viking prince, but because she already knows what will happen. This aspect of the vision only becomes clear after Olga informs him that she is pregnant, and it is part of what drives him to turn back and face Fjölnir. Even if he dies, Amleth is confident that his bloodline will be passed down to the twins, who will one day take their rightful place as rulers. For a long time, King Aurvandill was only revered in the eyes of Amleth, whose viewpoint was the only one that mattered. Finally, Amleth is forced to murder not only his mother but also his half-brother Gunnar (Elliott Rose), effectively robbing Fjölnir of everything in the same way that his own future was robbed as a child. Amleth completes his mission to avenge his father while also avenging himself in a hazy sense. Even after learning the truth about his father’s death and that his mother orchestrated the entire plot to kill War-Raven and flee with Fjölnir to start a new life, Amleth insists on avenging his father.

Alexander Skarsgard and Anya Taylor-Joy headline this most tortured tale of moral relativism.

He visits the Temple of Bjork and she reminds him of his oath, and then a RAVEN alights and LOOKS him in THE EYE. He quits the Viking gig and cuts off his hair and brands himself like a slave and passes himself as such on a boat headed to Fjolnir’s sheep farm in Iceland. Fjolnir is no longer king but that doesn’t mean he deserves to still have his head attached to his body. The Northman is perhaps a statement on the folly of revenge and, for that matter, that of fate itself, since the people of ca. Fate tugs at Amleth: He follows the fox to get to the He-witch, he consults the He-witch to get the rope, he uses the rope to get to the zombie, he vanquishes the zombie to get the sword and he’ll use the sword to get his revenge, which wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside him – but to what end? This Viking tale – co-written by Eggers and Icelandic poet-artist Sjon, and derived from the Saxo Grammaticus-penned legend that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet – is one damn thing after another, rotating among scenes of grotesque violence, whispered declarations and pagan rituals ranging from randy courtship dances to human sacrifice, because in this culture, putting people into this world is just as maniacally fun as taking them out of it. I also feel Fjolnir’s pain when he declares, “This is not the work of my god. It’s time to initiate his successor to the Tree of Kings, which requires him to bring Amleth to Heimir the Fool and Also the Mystical Dealer of Scandinavian Psychedelics, who will have them bark and howl and run about on all fours like wolves and lap up the drugs and belch and fart and levitate in front of surreal visions and take a pledge of vengeance when fathers are killed in glory in battle and now Amleth is a man. Odin has brought King Aurvandill War-Raven (Hawke) home from battle to his wife Queen Gudrun (Kidman) and tween son Amleth (Oscar Novak). Aurvandill hugs the living shit out of his boy; it’s a man’s man’s man’s man’s man’s world. So what we have here is a revenge picture enriched by eye-widening things: surreal iconography, liturgical deliria, soothsayer Bjork, an old desiccated severed head whose incredibly distinctive bone structure is clearly that of Willem Dafoe – things we haven’t seen before. The boy watches as Fjolnir (Claes Bang) commits regicide and sends his men to commit nepoticide, but when Amleth escapes, he vows to commit avunculicide because one doesn’t take a stoned lupine-oath without being fully dedicated to it. Prepare to die” for a new generation. His latest is a Viking revenge saga promising enough barbarity and attention to authentic period minutiae to render one slackjaw with awe. All the better to help one achieve fireside reverie in praise of battle, and then run fearlessly into such, putting an ax into lesser men until their blood runs down one’s chiseled f—ing delts, lats and abs – and one red droplet down his cheek like a tear.

"The Northman" is the latest film from critically acclaimed director Robert Eggers. It's based on the Scandinavian legend of Amleth, the direct inspiration for ...

If you buy them, we may get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our partners. Compared to "The Witch" and "The Lighthouse," "The Northman" is a bit more accessible to mainstream audiences thanks to its straightforward, familiar plot and exciting action. If you buy "The Northman," you may also want to consider a Movies Anywhere membership. The movie currently holds an "89% Certified Fresh" rating on review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 317 reviews from critics. The production also spotlights historical accuracy in every detail, including the villages, clothing, ceremonies, and weaponry. "The Northman" tells the tale of a Viking prince (Alexander Skarsgård), dead set on avenging his father's murder.

The Sandra Bullock-Channing Tatum adventure rom-com The Lost City is on Paramount Plus, while the Uncharted adaptation with Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg is now ...

But where that film told a simple yarn with an audacious, lived-in, widescreen style, Monstrous, directed by Chris Sivertson and written by Carol Chrest, brings a straightforward approach to material that has more going on under the surface. Christina Ricci stars in this horror movie about a woman and her young son who move to a faraway house to escape her abusive ex-husband. When her attempt to pilfer a priceless jewel lands her in the crosshairs of a clandestine group of villains led by Black Mask and Interpol, she’ll have to turn to the aid of Batwoman in order to save her own skin and once again come out on top. Rebel Wilson stars as a former cheerleader in this different take on a high school comedy. Set in the last days of communism in Poland, the action-comedy crime drama The Getaway King is based on the real-life story of Zdzisław “Najmro” Najmrodzki (Dawid Ogrodnik), a wily, streetwise thief infamous for escaping imprisonment over 29 times. Set in the year 2045, the film follows Motoko Kusanagi and her mercenary group of former Public Security Section 9 members who are re-recruited by Daisuke Aramaki to investigate and fend off an new existential threat to humanity in the form of a mysterious organization of superhuman individuals known as “post-humans.” Following a family vacationing at a tropical resort, the movie takes a dark turn when they and fellow guests at the resort find themselves trapped on a mysterious beach with no way to escape. One of the people trapped on the beach, played by The Underground Railroad’s Aaron Pierre, is a rapper named Mid-Sized Sedan. Really. On a thematic one, it’s an agitprop romance, one of the most effective mass media diagnoses of the current moment that finds countless things to be angry about, and proposes fighting them all with radical, reckless love. When their daughter, Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), manifests powerful pyrokinetic abilities after her 11th birthday, the family go on the run to protect from government agents tasked with hunting them down and experimenting on her. Two of our picks for the best movies of the year so far are now available to rent in The Northman and Ambulance, as is the animated heist comedy The Bad Guys. The Sandra Bullock-Channing Tatum adventure rom-com The Lost City is on Paramount Plus, while the Uncharted adaptation with Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg is now a $5.99 rental. 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.

The newest Viking movie is not what you'd expect it to be—if you haven't seen Robert Eggers' previous works.

It is hard to make a Viking movie feel fresh and different from previous efforts, but they indubitably pulled it off. The movie is, for a lack of a better word, beautiful. Unlike the other methods of making the movie feel alien, however, the way the characters talked did not add to the immersive experience, but actually took me out of it every now and then. Continuing the attempt to feel foreign and different, the movie uses old, theatrical English as if it were a Shakespeare original. “The Northman” follows Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), whose father (Ethan Hawke), a Viking king (a ViKing, if you will) is murdered by his uncle, Fjölnir (Claes Bang). Fjölnir proceeds to kidnap Amleth’s mother (Nicole Kidman) and forces Amleth to flee, starting the young prince’s journey of revenge. This creepy aura is maintained through special moments in these performances, such as when Taylor-Joy’s Olga enchants the wind to fill up the sails of a rowboat, or when Dafoe adorns a beastly grin, ready to test the young prince’s humanity.

Nevertheless, the character has much in common with William Shakespeare's Danish prince, who famously uttered the above quote during a soliloquy in Act Three of ...

This is the moment in Hamlet where, via accusations of lust and shame, the son is able to break through to his mother about her sins. In a strange way, this returns to the original Amleth tale in which the father’s wife knows her brother-in-law killed him… Eggers takes one of the most ambiguous mysteries in the Shakespeare canon and makes it so much more twisted. In the case of the former, Oedipal subtexts are heightened when in her first scene, Kidman’s Gudrún is introduced changing—and she immediately scolds her son for barging into her chambers without permission to enter. “I see you’ve inherited your father’s simpleness,” she mocks in what becomes a stunning revelation that not only was she happy to become Fjölnir’s wife, but she was the one who begged him to kill her husband, whom she never loved. This gives credence to the theory that the story of Amleth goes back to a forgotten Icelandic saga from the Viking Age. And for what it’s worth Icelandic historian Thormodus Torfæus recorded that in his youth—which would’ve been in the early 1600s—the legend of “Amlodi” was a popular one shared among children. In the Danish text, Amleth is the son of Jutland’s King Horvendill, who after a successful expedition that led to him slaying one of the kings of Norway has returned home to marry Gerutha, a princess from another Danish kingdom. When we spoke to Eggers about the film, he noted the story of Amleth was a larger inspiration for him to chase his own Berserker ghosts. However, Amleth steals the letter and alters it in the night so that his guardsmen are the ones put to death, and further Feng’s English ally must marry his daughter to Amleth! The most significant of these is the transformation of the Gertrude role. “To be or not to be.” That is a question which never occurs to Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth in The Northman. He knows exactly what he’ll be next week. Still, the most famous medieval version of the story is the one penned by Saxo Grammaticus in either the late 12th or early 13th century.

What would happen if a Viking skald were armed with a modern Hollywood budget and set loose to create a film? Probably something quite like The Northman.

As alluded to before, The Northman posits a pagan rendition of the legend that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It makes for an interesting counterpart to the play. The main action of the movie is set while Amleth is thirty-three, the same age as Jesus during the events of his Passion and Resurrection. A collaborator asked if that age had any significance. His identification with the oppressed is a mere happenstance, in service of his overriding duty of retributive violence. Seers can speak for the dead or the gods, a magic sword can only be unsheathed in darkness or at the gates of Hel, and Valkyries carry those felled in battle to Valhalla. That’s just the way the world is. The people kidnapped and trafficked into slavery by Viking raiders are branded with crosses (Amleth brands himself, too, as part of his disguise). Olga is a Slavic pagan, but other slaves are evidently Christians, scorned by their Norse oppressors as “blood-drinking Christians” and worshippers of a hanged man. Maintaining this tenor shows a real commitment to giving us a Viking’s-eye-view of life and death. These questions never trouble Amleth. The contrast shows how much of Hamlet’s trouble and Hamlet’s interest come from a Christian milieu. Death in battle is a happy ending for a Viking, and after the massacre is complete, the film closes with a sense of accomplishment rather than futility. The broad strokes of the plot will sound familiar to anyone who knows Hamlet: A prince loses his father to treachery, is spurred to vengeance by otherworldly utterances, and at last confronts his fratricidal uncle in a clash that leaves the stage strewn with corpses. Robert Eggers, director of The VVitch and The Lighthouse, marshals his facility with moody horror to depict pagan Scandinavia, red in tooth and claw. The movie is based on a Scandinavian legend that also inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though Eggers reaches past the earliest surviving renditions of the tale to imagine a pre-Christian version. Probably something quite like The Northman, an epic tale of fate and feuds culminating in a volcanic eruption of vengeance.

Roughly ten minutes into “The Northman,” the newest film from acclaimed horror director Robert Eggers, King Aurvandil War-Raven, portrayed by Ethan Hawke, ...

While it does not hit the crazed heights of its director’s last two films, it shows that Eggers remains a distinctive and exciting talent. In its brutal violence, formal rigor and ceaselessly immersive evocation of its setting, “The Northman” also brings to mind “The Witch,” Eggers’s triumphant period horror film that doubled as his directorial debut. Roughly ten minutes into “The Northman,” the newest film from acclaimed horror director Robert Eggers, King Aurvandil War-Raven, portrayed by Ethan Hawke, brings his young son, Amleth — portrayed by Oscar Novak as a child and Alexander Skarsgård as an adult — arrive at a cabin in the middle of the forest, ready to act out a royal ritual which has preceded them for generations.

His attention to detail is amazing and the level of care he unloads on every frame is legendary. This includes using actual film lenses from the 1920s and 30s ...

There's a line to walk, and Eggers seems to do it with the best of them. To ensure safety and continuity, we have to find ways to incorporate computer graphics into the field. We can’t actually get those that muddy, so they’re covered with mulch, and then we’re using CG to cover up the mulch with mud, so it looks consistent. Eggers said, “If you’re making a movie today at a certain scale, there’s no way you can do it without CG, just because of modern health and safety stuff, and the cost of labor, and unions and whatever. Robert Eggers likes to make period movies where everything is real—and I like to watch them. It's a movie where the actors wore handmade costumes and the drying fish in the villages were real.

“The Northman” feels like the live action version of a magical myth from eons past. It is an interweaving of ancient religious practice, ...

Sure, the echoes remain — “Hamlet” was a modernization of this story and “The Lion King” was a modernization of this story. This story was, in the end, a savage but breathtaking retelling of an ancient myth, beautifully acted and well costumed — and I suspect, something nobody wants to watch. The violence doesn’t even have a payoff the way “Game of Thrones” generally did, with its twists and turns. It is a real slog to watch, just as I imagine life back then was a real slog to live. Afterward, I was intrigued to learn that “The Northman” is actually a telling of the Norse myth of Amleth — the story which Hamlet is based on (Shakespeare just moved the H!) — making this the original tale, one we are very familiar with by now. “The Northman” feels like the live action version of a magical myth from eons past.

Skarsgard reportedly approached director Robert Eggers with the idea for the film, as he had always wanted to do a Viking movie. Skarsgard is the son of actor ...

There is realism in the landscapes, as it was shot mostly in Ireland and Iceland and the story takes place in locations that are now Scotland, Ukraine and Iceland. In the beginning of the film two ravens fly towards the place where the story begins. She is a Talent Manager with Studio Talent Group in Santa Monica. [email protected] Skarsgard reportedly approached director Robert Eggers with the idea for the film, as he had always wanted to do a Viking movie. When asked why his movies are set in the past, Eggers quotes 17th century poet John Dryden: “For mankind is ever the same and nothing is lost out of nature, though everything is altered.” Eggers adds, “As much as I am, like, totally in love with the verisimilitude of the tangible world, it’s getting into the mind. The legend of Amleth is from one of the sources that Shakespeare used for his plays, the “History of the Danes,” by medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus. The Vikings were intrepid travelers, mostly from the Scandinavian region. This is a classic epic set in that era and follows the Scandinavian legend of “Amleth,” a legendary Viking warrior played by Alexander Skarsgard. To appreciate the story a bit of historical background is advantageous.