A promising cast and an alluring premise. Vaguely based on the story of Amleth that would later serve as an inspiration for the play Hamlet by Shakespeare and set in an ancient Viking land, this movie will violate your ears with hours of endless strident yelling and it will assault your eyes with extreme and gruesome display of violence. The actors showed terrific performances for the most part, although I have to say, pretty over-the-top at times. Still some scenes are quite memorable. Surely its strength lies in its stunning cinematography, charged with powerful and mythical visuals that evoked the same darkness you will find in Goya paintings, but with a Nordic flavor. However is that enough to make up for the weak dialogs and the lack of an original story? What they lacked in plot subtance they made up for in excess of unsolicited gore. Do we really need this kind of violence on the big screen in 2022? Shouldn't this film be promoted as a horror movie? Had this film been advertised as a horror flick, instead of a Nordic saga, filmgoers would have been more prepared for all explicit content we were exposed to. Personally I think Eggers' previous work was by far superior partly because they were more subtle and nowhere near as obvious as The Northman.
Review of The Northman
