The Northman Cometh | The Northman (2022) Movie Review
If this movie isn’t what you want from a movie, what DO you want? 🤔
I LiveSky film reviews over on BlueSky, and then piece them together with commentary to make my full reviews here on Medium before they go to Letterbox’d. Please subscribe anywhere/everywhere you can for more of my shenanigans…
Well, unlike The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (which I also called early in my LiveSky review to more fully appreciate and immerse myself in the film), the back half of The Northman did not disappoint.
I’ve fallen in love with Robert Eggers’s films, of late. I was struck by The Witch, positively blown away by The Lighthouse and found Nosferatu to be interesting and compelling, despite being adapted from kind of a cursed IP and despite relying so bafflingly much on Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance, which was not up to the job.
Every facet of this film was up to the job, and more. I am, once again, blown away.
Dafoe (Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice aside, and frankly, nothing he did could have saved that trash fire, not that he did anything worthwhile in that movie) is one of the most reliably compelling and interesting performers in memory. In The Lighthouse, I firmly believe there’s absolutely no way that movie works as well as it does without what he brings to it. Pattinson was similarly brilliant and took similarly big, fascinating swings, but he sadly was not tapped to appear in this feature. I firmly believe that Pattinson could improve any project he’s signed to (I felt the same way about Dafoe… until I saw Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice).
Dafoe is a microwave Sixth Man in this one, absolutely crushing his performance as Heimir the Fool, the mystic-seer-cum-jester in King Aurvandill War-Raven’s court. This film delves pretty confidently and deeply into the realm of surrealism, and Dafoe does a lot of heavy-lifting that makes it seem true and real, even when it’s arguably psychedelic and experimental filmmaking.
As artistically ambitious and surreal as The Northman often is, it is by no means inaccessible. In fact, the plot is quite simple.
Let me be clear: my saying the plot is simple is not a slight. If anything, a convoluted or messy, sprawling, multivariate story is an obstacle that a good movie must overcome in order to be good.
A simple plot, like the revenge plot that drives this film, can more reliably serve as the sturdy narrative frame on which to hang the artistry and theme and messaging of a film.
That is one thousand percent the case here.
If I were to just tell you the story here — and I won’t; I don’t think this movie could be spoiled, but I won’t even chance it — it wouldn’t take me but a handful of seconds, and you’d be like, “… oh, okay [shrug].”
The Northman is not its plot.
What The Northman is is alchemy, a perfect mélange of best-in-class cinematography (Jarin Blaschke, who also worked with Eggers on The Lighthouse and Nosferatu), dynamic, riveting performances (the aforementioned Dafoe, Alexander Skarsgård and Anya Taylor-Joy are exceptional and equally-matched in both energy and talent, there isn’t a weak performance in the film) and a positively bulletproof and enviable script. I wish I could write like Eggers and Sjón (just the one name, like Björk or Madonna) did here.
Without fail, every page of this script (I’m not kidding, EVERY page, at least once every one or two minutes of the runtime) had a line that made me gasp, it was such the perfect thing for that character to say.
I won’t spoil anything, but at one point, when some truly grotesque, horrific violence has befallen five different people, whose corpses have all been butchered and arranged into the rough shape of a horse, nailed to a building, the clan beholding it ponders whether it might have been a dark, malign spirit, or maybe those weird Christians, because after all, their god is a corpse nailed to a tree. Seems like their brand.
I think it’s well worth spending some time praising Anya Taylor-Joy’s tremendous performance as Olga, the witch. When handed a script featuring a meaty, substantive, worthwhile role for a woman, she spun gold into platinum. I think it’s a great advertisement (in a Build It and They Will Come kind of way) for what can and will happen when filmmakers and studios start leaning into writing for and to women more.
Skarsgård is magnetic and dynamic, making the absolute most of his lines and taking up the bulk of the onscreen time, yet Taylor-Joy is every bit his equal as an acting partner and performer in her own right, and their scenes together sing with intensity. Each inarguably complements the other and makes them better in every scene they share.
On the surface, this might seem to be a Man Story — and it is a man’s story. But Olga has a couple of the best lines in the film, and she’s every bit the warrior and fighter Amleth is, in her own way.
She’s a triumph. The film is a triumph. For my money, The Northman is (if we must compare) marginally less of a big swing/big risk than The Lighthouse, and the number bear it out, too. The Lighthouse grossed a reported $18.3 million at the box office, versus The Northman’s $69.6 million, both paltry compared to a middling Marvel film, but a wide gulf that speaks to each’s accessibility.
However, they’re both as close to art as commercial filmmaking comes these days, and I’d argue Robert Eggers (along with a cadre of supremely-talented other people who seem thrilled to come back and worth with him again and again) is setting the standard for what it means to be a creative or an artist in this weird era of hyper-late-stage-Capitalism, and how to be successful in saying something worth hearing to an audience that has to pay for the privilege of hearing it.
See The Lighthouse. See The Northman. The next movie Robert Eggers makes? See that one, too.
He has a proven track record (Nosferatu was an uncharacteristically mid film for him, and while it doesn’t hold up next to his other three films, it was still quite good relative to its peers), and he’s clearly in the business of making quality art.
Honestly, if, at this point in his career, Robert Eggers isn’t giving you what you want from film, then what do you want from film?
