Robert Eggers’ The Northman is a Viking epic that roars like a beast, slashes like a blade, and ultimately sinks like a stone. It’s what happens when a director gets a blank check and decides to spend most of it on mud, growling, and shirtless howling at the moon. It wants to be Hamlet meets Conan the Barbarian filtered through a Carl Jung fever dream, but ends up playing like a $90 million Rage Against the Fjords music video that forgot to include any real emotion or story structure. It’s moody. It’s broody. It’s got more abs than arcs.
Let’s set the scene. Young Prince Amleth (played as an adult by Alexander Skarsgård, aka Norse Jesus on HGH) watches his father (Ethan Hawke) get murdered by his uncle (Claes Bang), who then marries his mom (Nicole Kidman). Sound familiar? It should. It’s the same revenge plot you’ve seen a thousand times, but this one is marinated in ancient Icelandic doom-poetry and slow-motion axe swings. “I will avenge you, Father. I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir.” That’s Amleth’s mantra. He repeats it over and over again like a Nordic Dora the Explorer, only with less emotional range.
To Eggers’ credit, The Northman looks amazing. It’s filmed like a high-fashion death cult fantasy—grim vistas, volcanic ash clouds, and battle scenes that feel like they were choreographed by someone tripping on fermented goat’s milk. There are one-take tracking shots of berserkers tearing through villages, their bodies smeared with blood and the sort of masculinity you need a tetanus shot to survive. It’s visceral, yes. But so is food poisoning.
The problem? Once you get past the aesthetic blood splatter and the impressive beard game, there’s very little beating under the surface. It’s all style, no soul. The characters grunt, glower, and occasionally hallucinate, but rarely connect as human beings. Eggers is so committed to making everything mythologically accurate and spiritually authentic that he forgets to make anyone remotely relatable. You could replace the entire cast with meat slabs and a fog machine, and I’m not sure the emotional impact would change.
Skarsgård’s Amleth is a walking slab of vengeance, all dead eyes and primal rage. He’s like if someone gave a werewolf a gym membership and a strict code of Norse ethics. The man snarls, kills, and broods with the intensity of a hungover bear who just remembered it left the oven on. But he doesn’t grow. He doesn’t change. He’s a Viking Roomba—programmed to seek revenge and growl at anything that moves.
Nicole Kidman, bless her frostbitten soul, is stuck in one of the strangest roles of her career. She plays the mother-slash-queen-slash-Oedipal fever dream who goes from damsel to deviant faster than you can say “Freudian nightmare.” In one scene she’s tearfully enslaved. In another, she’s confessing to things that would make even Game of Thrones go, “You sure about that?” It’s not bad acting—it’s just that the material treats character motivation like a sacrificial goat: bleed it dry and move on.
Anya Taylor-Joy is also here, doing her best in a role that feels like it was written during a blackout with a Rune translator app. She plays Olga, a sorceress-slash-love interest-slash-plot device who mostly stares meaningfully and says cryptic things about destiny. She’s supposed to be the humanizing anchor, but it’s hard to feel grounded when the script gives her all the warmth of a frozen fjord.
Then there’s the mysticism. Eggers clearly wants to immerse us in the mythic worldview of the Norse, and to that end we get visions of Valkyries, tree ancestors, talking skulls, and a duel on the lip of a volcano that looks like Mortal Kombat for philosophy majors. All of it is interesting in theory. In practice, it’s like being stuck in a history museum diorama while someone pounds on a war drum and whispers about fate. There’s symbolism everywhere—phallic swords, erupting mountains, bloodlines—but it’s all delivered with such ponderous self-importance that you start to feel like you’re being held hostage by a Scandinavian Reddit thread on masculinity.
What’s especially frustrating is that there are moments of brilliance. The ritualistic moments, the eerie dreamscapes, the barbaric pageantry—all of it suggests Eggers has a truly original vision. But then he fumbles it by insisting on grim monotony. The pacing is glacial. There’s no sense of surprise, no meaningful shifts in tone or momentum. You know exactly where this is going within the first ten minutes, and then it takes two full hours and a lava fight to finally get there. By that point, your soul’s already halfway to Valhalla from boredom.
It’s a revenge story, yes—but there’s no real catharsis. No twist. No tension. The film mistakes inevitability for profundity, like a drunk Odin scrawling runes in the sand and insisting it’s poetry. Eggers wants you to feel the weight of myth, the inexorability of fate. But mostly you feel the weight of sitting in a theater wondering if Vikings ever just, you know… talked about their feelings.
The best part of the movie, weirdly, might be Björk. Yes, Iceland’s own mystical space queen shows up briefly as a blind seeress who delivers some prophecy gobbledygook and disappears like a fever dream with a feathered headdress. It’s strange and unsettling, which is to say: it works. Because unlike the rest of the movie, her scene has actual texture and madness. The rest is just high-concept cosplay in the key of grunts and grayscale.
In the end, The Northman is a film so obsessed with legacy and mythology that it forgets how stories actually work. Characters need arcs. Emotions need texture. And revenge, while satisfying, needs more than a six-pack and a pile of corpses to feel meaningful. Eggers swings for the Viking moon and ends up clubbing us over the head with symbolism and self-seriousness.
Rating: 2 out of 5 berserker growls.
Watch it if you want to see what happens when someone spends $90 million to make a very angry man scream into the northern wind for two hours. Or just watch The Lion King again—it’s basically the same story, but with more singing and fewer volcano swords.