THE NORTHMAN reviewed
All wolves go to Valhöll
But it is more. It is one of the most significant films made in many, many years. It cannot be seen only for its basic merits as a film for two tightly linked reasons: Firstly, it is “very Indo-European”. Secondly, it is—and if unconsciously so, if an emanation of director Robert Eggers’ spirit, all the better—a film-against-time.
Let’s get basics out of the way. THE NORTHMAN is a strong offering; COVID precautions meant principal photography took place mostly in Northern Ireland standing in for the Iceland where only a few shots were done and in which the story takes place. The geology and climate situation of Iceland, Northern Ireland, The Hebrides, and Scandinavia’s shores are similar and the titular ‘Northmen’ who made their viking raids did so from Vinland to Sicily, so the craggy, beautiful Northern Ireland is as good a mockup for Iceland as any. People tend to praise good ‘cinematography’ the way they praise good ‘acting’—good movies have it, bad movies don’t. It’s hard, as anyone who has vacationed in the Scottish Highlands or visited Iceland will tell you, to capture what it looks like on a phone. The massiveness just doesn’t translate well. In key shots this is somehow masterfully done. Besides the landscape, the cuts and pans are what you’d expect. You don’t notice them, there’s little to say, if you’ve watched Game of Thrones, (boy, didn’t that just fall out of cultural memory?) you’ll get the same.
I don’t know any music theory, so the way I evaluate a score composition is by noticing how much unbidden emotion it inspires in me. I’m a child of the most irony-poisoned and unmerited-ly jaded Millennial generation. Master and Commander, 300, Blackhawk Down, The Gladiator, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and DUNKIRK’s scores all succeeded at least for me, in tapping into the primitives of the old primate instinct which the on-screen action evokes. The imagery and the music become one in THE NORTHMAN. This is a film that will remind you swinging a dulled axe through a man’s skull before he plunges a spear into your heart isn’t something you are capable of and you ought lift more.
Popular taste has always favored the heroic epic. Both the oldest stories humanity has recollection of from its holy books and its national literatures to the Marvel Cinematic Universe schlock which has plagued us for more than a decade are stories of the Gods in combat and intrigue against one another and mere mortal figures transcending so to do battle on the very same grounds. Other story motifs exist of course, and the budgets and blaring-horn scores of ‘epic’ films have only gotten bigger and louder, but this film absolutely nails it.
The real depth of the film however, is likely to be missed by many, including the positive reviewers, but of course the negative ones.THE NORTHMAN doesn’t try, at all, to ‘contextualize’ its historical, anthropological, ethnoreligious grounding because such a pose wasn’t accessible to its protagonists in mythos, nor even those who first recorded it. If you re-animated aTyrannosaurus Rex, it would be King of Terrible Lizards, it’d not eat plant-based foods, but not to ‘own any libs’. Take the plot. I saw a revealing comment under Youtube video trailer where someone praised “it has elements of Hamlet and Macbeth, and a touch of the Lord of the Rings”. This is amusing, but also tragic. It doesn’t have their elements. It is that from which they sprung.
Amleth’s mythic story put down into Latin by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus in the Gesta Danorum, ‘Dane’s Deeds’ is the basis for Hamlet. The three-witches who cast toil and trouble in the Scottish Play recall the old pieties about the Norns, the weavers of fates. The White Tree of Gondor came to Tolkien because he’d read of Yggdrasill and Barnstokkr. It is this tale of Amleth’s vengeance which the viewer is told, episodically, like they are reading the Poetic and Prose Eddas or the Icelander’s Sagas. THE NORTHMAN does this telling with as much touch on details as it can, but it does not attempt to justify itself.
Cultural works often commit such errors because so much of our modern condition is divorced from anything other than ‘Universal Culture’ even if we have something else. We are steeped in it. Go to an ‘Indian Wedding’ in the US, and often some well to do Hindu and Muslim families will feel it necessary to have little Explainer cards and even say what’s going on in the wedding program so the goras can follow along. If you go to even a conservative Catholic wedding and they read the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians saying ‘Wives, submit to your husbands’, you can feel the young women in the pews grimace.
THE NORTHMAN is filled with this. The very first moments see a hilarious performance from Willem Dafoe acting the jester, interrupting formal courtesan language that sounds almost stilted when it is non-war related, and childish when it is. As audiences (and especially as reviewers for The New York Times and The Guardian) we are doubly divorced from European Christendom (which wasn’t quite so Liberal as we are now) and pre-Christian Europe (forget about it.)—we do not comprehend much less inhabit the minds of Viking warrior kings. But these were not always simply theme park jokes for classic Capital One ads; the Northmen and among them their Vikings and Berserkers were real men. They didn’t worship Odin like modern Ásatrú and associated neo-pagans, because of fascination of the old world, or as deliberate political rejection of Christian informed Liberalism, but because their fathers worshipped Odin.
When Amleth becomes a man with his father, he undergoes a viking rite that recalls the pan-Indo-European tradition of the Kóryos—the ‘wolf-warriors’ known to the Old Norse, the ancient Greeks, and the Vedic Indians—the adolescent men who would become ‘as’ wolves for us, and become wolves to them, with nothing to live for but filling empty bellies and sating fiery loins, forcefully confiscating cattle and women as all so much chattel, murdering any who opposed them and perhaps their own who couldn’t keep up or were weak.
Nothing about this, or the horse sacrifices, or the seiðr rituals, is explained for the viewer. There is no context given to any of it because why would there be? Why would someone compiling the Sagas have tried to do that? Instead you are made a witness, as much as possible to the honor and brutality and cunning and ribaldry and tragedy and rage of a world that is passed. Robert Eggers, like Saxo Grammaticus and the compilers of Old Norse tales who lived in a Christian age, lives in an age that is post-Christian. To skip back not one, but two universal dispositions ago is something far beyond mere reactionary conservatism.
That is the level of sophistication with which this movie was conceived. For a culture where searching the name of Thor gives you something like this:
THE NORTHMAN delivers a long overdue antidote. In fact it doesn’t even concern itself with that. Water doesn’t know about the poor food you’ve eaten.
The cultural moment we are stuck inside of, for now (I say this because it is built on so much that is against Nature and against Truth than I cannot think it persists forever—only how that its end might be hastened or its just overturn be made more complete), is one that will of course see this film accused of everything from being too simplistic to committing ‘white supremacy’.
Some of the negative reviewers are there to pretend the movie made mistakes with dialogue, “pacing”, and establishing relationships (again, see the modern sensibility?). I guarantee none of these people have ever read anything from the cultural source material. But other reviewers will be there to call the film racist and evil and too-White. It’s already begun. I would say this; they’re getting at something true. THE NORTHMAN is not a movie that everyone can watch and expect to feel the same resonance with, for the same reason Japanese anime are most popular in Japan, despite having plenty of patronage in the United States.
To the extent that the film makes no effort at being accessible or sufficiently complex, to the extent it depicts masculine power from and heroism by Northwestern European peoples and thus instantly causes trepidation and fashionable write-offs among the pudgy and global and naysaying classes, it is a singular work. Go see it on the big screen while it is in theaters.
10/10
Hávamál 76-80
Deyr fé, deyja frændr,
deyr sjalfr it sama,
ek veit einn, at aldrei deyr:
dómr um dauðan hvern.
Kine die, kinsmen die,
dies oneself, the same,
I know one thing, that never dies;
the fame of a dead man's deeds.