Northman

The revenge saga blends traditional accounts with the supernatural to convey the lived experience of the Viking age.

Neil Price, an archaeologist at the University of Uppsala and the author of Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings, was one of three historical consultants for The Northman. In an email, he says, “The people of the Viking Age inhabited an organic story-world in which tales changed in the telling. These details are “a way of conveying a layered view of an ancient reality on its own terms,” says Price. “Most of the material culture, and even the behavior [of the characters], is deliberately left unexplained. All of this nuance is a lot to put on a $90 million film that will need a wide audience to recoup its investment. Just before the section on Amleth, the Danish historian recounts the murder of the god Baldur in a matter-of-fact historical voice. Instead, it’s trying to create a different, more medieval type of authenticity by telling a tale that would have been recognizable to the storytellers and audiences of the Middle Ages. What this mean is that The Northman combines elements of different types of medieval sagas, blending traditional stories about Norse families (which often include convoluted revenge plots) with tales of gods, monsters and witches to create a hybrid account that would have easily fit into the extant body of Norse literature. Soon, the deposed prince learns of his uncle’s move to Iceland and receives a prophecy (from none other than the singer Björk) imploring him to seek revenge. “We [worked] with archaeologists and historians, trying to recreate the minutiae of the physical world, while also attempting to capture, without judgment, the inner world of the Viking mind: their beliefs, mythology and ritual life,” says Eggers in a statement. In the roughly two hours between these scenes, The Northman does everything it can to pull the viewer into a medieval landscape that is both familiar and strange, grounded in the physical world while soaring into supernatural realms that were an inextricable part of medieval Icelandic life. Co-written by Eggers and Sjón, an Icelandic poet and novelist, the movie is set mainly in Iceland rather than Denmark. The story starts the same way, with a fratricide. Saxo’s version of Amleth’s story will be familiar to anyone who has read Hamlet. A man kills his brother, the king; marries his former sister-in-law; and seizes the throne. By the movie’s end, a different shade of red has overtaken the screen.

The brutality and painstaking nature of Robert Eggers's third film is admirable and entertaining, but there's still a sense of the director playing it a ...

Eggers deserves kudos for refusing to compromise, but the fact that he made The Northman entirely on his own terms means he’s also entirely responsible for its shortcomings. For all the smashed-in faces and spilled intestines on display, there’s also a feeling that Eggers is playing things safe. Her Highness is played by Nicole Kidman in a role that seems completely thankless right until it doesn’t, at which point it gives the actress some of her best material in years: a big scene with Skarsgard that functions as a for-your-consideration clip, a Big Little Lies reunion, and a lightning rod for controversy. A couple of scenes later, the pair engage in the Viking equivalent of having a catch: they descend into a cave, pretend to be wolves, and ritualistically trip balls in front of a burning wall of fire. While Amleth is happy to maul and pillage—and he’s very, very good at it—he draws the line at killing women and children. The vision-quest stuff in The Northman is goofy as hell, but it’s also hard to begrudge Eggers his excess: like Hawke says, the guy is trying. It’s a thin line between ancient, universal archetype and easy, crowd-pleasing convention, and the sense that The Northman is using one to justify the other chips away significantly at its wild, violent ambition. What’s at stake in its release is on one level industrial: the commercial prospects of blockbuster entertainment not derived from expensive IP (unless you consider the Shakespeare Extended Universe to be a rival to Marvel). More importantly, though, the film is an aesthetic reckoning for its creator and his audience. Invoking Mel Gibson is a bit risky given that The Northman potentially scans as a hymn to Ubermenschian ideals; in 1982, reviewing Conan the Barbarian, Roger Ebert expressed discomfort with its fascist-slash-white-supremacist undertones. They have the balls, and the hubris and the arrogance to say, ‘I want to make a masterpiece.’” That unapologetic yearning for greatness—and for tableaus imbued with some vast, Coppola-sized scale—is palpable in The Northman’s early scenes, which center on Hawke’s weary, battle-scarred monarch Aurvandil War-Raven. Returning to his castle after a successful foreign campaign, Hawke heads a military procession whose slow creep through a filthy village and up a foggy mountain allows Eggers to indulge in the kind of dexterous, extended shots that get directors crowned as kings—world-building as a form of showing off. There’s a bit of Arnold Schwarzenegger here, too: In high-concept terms, The Northman is Hamlet meets Conan the Barbarian, with all the bloody pulp, bulging abs, and hallucinatory grandeur that marriage implies. The answer is that Robert Eggers’s new period epic The Northman is based on the same 12th century legend that initially inspired William Shakespeare. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Sulking in exile after the murder of his father by an unscrupulous uncle, a Scandanavian prince plots his return and revenge.

The Northman features a sequence revolving around what could be described as a game of medieval Scandinavian Quidditch, the rules of which are vague but ...

The action begins with the return of King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) to his home. It’s a world of magic and visions, of witches and fools, of Valkyries and Valhalla. The Northman features a sequence revolving around what could be described as a game of medieval Scandinavian Quidditch, the rules of which are vague but involve scoring by winging a ball off a stake of wood.

Where "The Northman" elides Shakespeare's text, "West Side Story" is a refraction of adaptations. We're in an era of Shakespherean adaptations filled with ...

" The Lion King" on Broadway was Shakespherean -- an adaptation of an adaptation of "Hamlet." "The Northman" isn't even Saxo Grammaticus' first film credit. Audiences often tend to look beyond the story in front of them to consider it in relation to its source -- what's the same and what's different? Attention shifts from the internal elements of the story -- plot, character, and theme -- to questions about how the artwork was created. This approach goes all the way back to a 1681 "King Lear" that went around Shakespeare's 1605 play to restore the happy ending from its source. Elisions, refractions, speculative biographies, theatrical afterlives -- these Shakespherean adaptations capitalize on the playwright's cultural prominence to generate an audience but dodge his actual plays and poems. Where "The Northman" elides Shakespeare's text, "West Side Story" is a refraction of adaptations. These shows work like older adaptations, such as Akira Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood" (based on "Macbeth" from 1957), Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" (on "Hamlet" from 1966), Julie Taymor's " Titus" (on "Titus Andronicus" from 1999) and Vishal Bhardwaj's " Omkara" (on "Othello" from 2006): rewriting Shakespeare's stories in modern settings, shifting them from the theater into new media, performing the plays in business casual, riffing on the hidden backstories of characters. " Ophelia," starring Daisy Ridley, told the story behind her story in Shakespeare's play. In contrast, " Station Eleven" turns to Shakespeare's afterlives. It just gets bonus points because Denzel. " Succession" and "Empire" are King Lear in the corporate world -- regular adaptations. He is the sun that holds this system together but, in this new era, fly too close and you might get burnt. A refraction is a never-ending infinity mirror reflecting Shakespeare into the abyss.

Dr. Neil Price, one of 'The Northman's historical consultants, answers burning questions about Robert Eggers' historical battle epic.

That tapestry is a copy of a real one from Norway. What’s interesting is that it’s full of bodies, and we usually say that they’re hanging from the tree as a sacrificial offering; but there are no ropes, and people are floating in the branches. The overriding force of the film is fate and whether you can escape it, which was central in the Norse mind. That sense of being a visitor to a world that you don’t quite understand — that doesn't explain itself and isn't interested in explaining itself to you — is where the real authenticity comes in. The current thinking is that it’s the Milky Way. If you’ve ever seen it in a place without modern light pollution, it can look astonishing as it goes across the sky. I’m thinking of the sequence in which Amleth catches a thrown spear and hurls it back at his enemies, and the subsequent berserker attack on the Slavic village. That space where that ritual takes place is based on one of those actual prehistoric mounds that we know the Vikings broke into. For Robert, the detail is more in service to an atmosphere, a layering of feeling that you’re actually in the past. That scene is also a good example of the different boundaries of authenticity in this mythical world because, although nothing tells you this in the film, everything in that burial that he breaks into is a couple of hundred years older than everything else in the movie. But if you could take a Viking Age time traveler and show them the movie, there’s always the risk that their first question would be, “Why is everybody dressed like dead people?” We know they kill animals and sprinkle the blood around, as you see in the film, but exactly what they did inside those cultic buildings we don’t know. The first challenge of The Northman is that no historical advisor can give Robert that level of detail for the Viking Age. We’re talking well over 1,000 years ago. As a historical consultant on The Northman, Dr. Neil Price collaborated extensively with Eggers and his team to bring a full-blooded Viking civilization out of the past.

Dozens of viking extras, nonstop rain, and a village full of animals — what could go wrong? Robert Eggers, Alexander Skarsgard, and the crew of the movie ...

The teams were made up of a mix of actors and stuntmen, and all of them needed somewhere to go and something to do. Much of the cast and crew had to hike a mile and half to get to the set, lugging equipment by hand. By time production resumed, only one had not been fully prepped: the Knattleikr sequence, where Amleth and his fellow slaves play a Viking ball game “so violent that some historians think they didn’t even keep track of” the score, Eggers said. That led him to the sagas, and those led him to making The Northman. And a lot of stuff we did do, they’re going to think was done for real,” Barson said. “Whereas I’m on set going, ‘You need to decide now.’” The sheer number of moving parts meant there was no end to the things that could screw up the flow: a horse not being in the right place, or an extra disappearing, then reappearing. It was the job of the visual-effects team, led by supervisor Angela Barson, to stitch them together. “It was nice to see it, and smell it,” he said. And so, at the height of a pandemic, a gardener traveled to an abandoned movie set and watered the fake Viking longhouse twice a week. The fifth syllable has to be a T because he enunciates that T so well,’” Eggers said. As Eggers puts it: “We did not have the experience to be making this film.” (To acknowledge her role as The Northman’s spiritual godmother, the singer has a cameo as a Viking witch.) For Sjón, the Icelandic sagas are “the only thing we have in this world to claim our seat at the table of civilization.” When he reads a particularly badass passage — like Skarphéðinn Njálsson’s joke about an adversary eating the ass of a mare — he can feel the joy of the storyteller echoing from a thousand years in the past.

Find out how to watch Robert Eggers' The Northman starring Alexander Skarsgård, whether it's streaming, when it's in theaters, and more.

The medieval figure is attributed to the writing of Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish historian, theologian, and author who wrote about Amleth in the third and fourth books of his Gesta Danorum series released during the 13th century. Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Olga of the Birch Forest, a sorceress who helps Amleth in his quest for revenge. Willem Dafoe stars as Helmir the Fool, a court jester for King Aurvandill who also serves as a high priest. Currently, the only place to watch The Northman is in movie theaters. Eggers wrote the screenplay for The Northman with Sjon, an Icelandic poet, novelist, and lyricist, who previously co-wrote the folk horror movie, Lamb. Here's how you can watch this dark revenge drama. Robert Eggers has established himself as one of the best filmmakers working today, with his horror features The Witch and The Lighthouse receiving high critical acclaim.

No moral judgment, just Viking honor, pagan ritual, and inevitable death.

For The Northman attempts to engage us with a culture and mindset we don't already know, one that's difficult and strange and alien and abhorrent, rather than comfort us with what's familiar. They did not see themselves as abominations committing atrocities, but as a pack of man-wolves with just as much right as any wolf pack to prey on the weak. But it renders no obvious judgment on Viking horrors except the judgment that the Viking warriors rendered on themselves. It's a mystical and barbarous world of gods and demons, in which nature is a source of awe and mystery that can only be understood as an enchanted force with a personality of its own. But one thing that fiction—movies, novels, television shows, and so forth—can do is help readers and viewers understand the mindset of primitive eras by attempting to portray the practices of those eras as they were understood at the time rather than as we understand them now. Something similar has been happening in Hollywood, arguably even before it became a debate in journalism, particularly with movies and TV shows that take place in the past.

A complete guide to the cast and characters of Robert Eggers' historical Viking epic The Northman, including Alexander Skarsgård and Anya Taylor-Joy.

“The Northman” marks Björk’s first feature film role since 1999’s “Dancer in the Dark.” The Icelandic native memorably portrays a mystical Seeress who reminds an adult Amleth of his purpose. Danish actor and musician Claes Bang takes on the villainous role of Fjölnir, who becomes Fjölnir The Brotherless when he betrays his brother King Aurvandil. The cold-hearted warrior has an infant son of his own, to whom he plans to one day bequeath the throne. Hot off her Oscar nomination for “Being The Ricardos,” Nicole Kidman appears in “The Northman” as Queen Gudrún, wife to King Aurvandil and mother of Amleth. The long-haired, ethereal beauty is taken by her brother-in-law after he steals the crown. Four-time Academy Award nominee Ethan Hawke plays King Aurvandil, the mighty Viking warrior-king of a small but flourishing island. Focus Features The epic tale is brought to life by a star-studded cast including Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman and Anya Taylor-Joy. To find out who else appears in the film, which is now playing exclusively in theaters, read on.

Robert Eggers's Alexander Skarsgård Viking saga makes no effort to bend its characters toward modern sensibilities, and you know what? It's great.

You don’t need to understand Amleth’s values to invest in his brutal journey, which is filled with heart-pounding set pieces and unabashed badassery — I was partial to the moment he casually catches a spear hurled down at him from the battlements and then tosses it back. Eggers’s debut feature, The Witch, strove to re-create the world as seen by its Puritan colonists — not just in the minutiae of their desperate efforts to carve survival for themselves out of the unforgiving wilderness, but in their certainty that the Devil was real and present and actively working against them in tangible ways. But its most notable quality is the way it refuses to bend its characters to the present, preferring instead to make them as alien in their perspective as possible. In Hamlet, she’d be Gertrude, but in the The Northman, which takes for its source material the brawnier, grislier legend on which the Shakespeare play is based, she’s named Gudrún, and she’s slung over the shoulder of her still-bloody new spouse Fjölnir (Claes Bang) and carried off as the spoils of fratricide. Kidman’s a scream in The Northman, and in a revisionist take on its tale, Gudrún would be a tragic feminist anti-heroine trying to engineer a life she wants from her unwilling perch in a society shaped around what she describes as savagery. She challenges Amleth’s assumption that it was Fjölnir she needed to be rescued from, showing him the slave brand on her chest and taunting him for believing his parents’ marriage was actually the fairy-tale joining of noble families he’d been told.

The movie gives us two naked men fighting in front of an erupting volcano, but it's still afraid of one thing.

In a film otherwise fiercely committed to no-punches-pulled realism (and featuring at least three full-body shots of a naked Taylor-Joy, one prominently featuring menstrual blood), was there really any need to digitally elide the battling men’s genitalia so that they appear to be fighting in unseen tighty-whities? The screenplay was co-authored by Eggers and the Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón, a frequent Björk collaborator who also co-wrote the recent folk-horror film Lamb. While the characters’ archaic locutions sometimes evoke laughs that may or may not be intentional, the dialogue also shows an acute ear for the beauty of language and an avoidance of historical anachronism that’s uncommon in the sword-and-sandal tradition this movie hails from. Working for the first time with a blockbuster-scaled budget, Eggers can give full range to his feverishly inventive imagination, and the result is often hypnotic, especially in some late sequences where the gravely injured Amleth envisions his entrance into the gates of Valhalla atop the steed of an airborne Valkyrie. On the ship he meets Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy), an enslaved Slavic woman who comes to work alongside him at the farm. The traumatized young royal vows, as he escapes alone in a rowboat, to avenge his beloved father’s death at all costs. After one especially epic berserking session in the “Land of the Rus” (all the scene changes are identified by runic intertitles), Amleth encounters a Slavic seeress (the Icelandic singer Björk, giving her first performance in a major movie since 2005) who reminds him of his fated encounter back in his native land.

Box Office: 'The Northman' $1.4M, 'Bad Guys' $1.1M, Nicolas Cage Satire $835K In Thursday Previews.

The latter’s running total is $130.6M, which is 16% ahead of the two-week cume of Sonic the Hedgehog back in 2020. Northman‘s Thursday is ahead of the Tuesday night previews of MGM/UAR’s House of Gucci ($1.3M), another adult skewing wide release, and next to pre-pandemic titles, specifically male-leaning, the Eggers movie is ahead of Warner Bros.’ action comedy War Dogs which did $1.25M and opened to $14.6M in late August 2016. The pic cost $30M before P&A, and Lionsgate held this one for theatrical rather than sell it off during the pandemic. Tracking has this one in the $5M-$7M range, which is a sad start for a movie that played like gangbusters out of its SXSW world premiere. Last night’s previews for The Bad Guys began at 5PM in 3,000 locations. Lionsgate’s Nicolas Cage satire The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent made $835K in pre-opening grosses.

“The Northman,” a blood-drenched viking epic from director Robert Eggers, pillaged $1.35 million from 2,700 theaters in Thursday previews, while “The Bad ...

“The Bad Guys” tells the story of a gang of crooks who try to go straight. “The Bad Guys,” a Dreamworks Animation film, which has enjoyed good reviews from critics, is on track to gross between $15 million to $20 million. That would be a strong result for an arthouse film, save for the fact that “The Northman” reportedly cost $90 million to make (insiders say that with tax credits that figure is closer to $70 million). That’s an awful lot of lucre.

"The Northman" writer-director Robert Eggers ADR'ed scenes in the editing room after test audiences balked from too much historical accuracy.

I’m not saying this is a perfect movie, but at least I can say I stand behind my choices, because I had to consider all of them so carefully.” Eggers concluded, “I needed the pressure of the studio to make the most entertaining version of this movie. “We worked with an Icelandic linguist, Haukur Þorgeirsson, and he was often taking poems written in Medieval Iceland to rewind them and translating into his interpretation of that.”

A Viking stands in the foreground of a village set while filming a movie. Actor Alexander Skarsgård along with cast and crew members on the set of Robert Eggers ...

“Everything that I have of interest to offer as a filmmaker I don’t get to use, so what’s the point? And I really was able to nail it, like I got what was in my imagination onto the screen. “It’s exciting when someone takes a swing like this and makes a big movie for the masses with integrity,” said Skarsgård. “I’ve got nothing against franchise movies or blockbuster movies or sequels or prequels or remakes. In particular, a pivotal scene where Amleth is reunited with his mother Gudrún — Skarsgård and Kidman had played husband and wife on “Big Little Lies” — highlighted the challenge of moving between action set pieces and more nuanced character-driven scenes. “What I’m trying to do is make a totally transportive period movie that explores the interior world of the period and makes the interior world and the exterior world a reality,” said Eggers. “And also something that strives to have a holistic cinematic language and a holistic cinematic approach. The fact that you can combine the two was such a privilege.” “This is a story that everybody knows,” Eggers said. But at the same time, stay true to the essence of the poetry of the old Icelandic sagas,” said Skarsgård. “I’d never seen that movie. Immediately after they finish the sagas in the 13th century, people start rewriting them, changing them into epic poems, into plays and whatnot,” said Sjón. “And I wondered if I had anything new to contribute to it. And I’ve said that it was the most painful thing I’ve experienced in my life, and, you know what, that’s a total fact,” he said. “[My first] two films were at a scale where entertainment didn’t need to be my main objective,” Eggers said ahead of the film’s theatrical release. Having disguised himself as a slave on Fjölnir’s farm to finish his quest, Amleth forms an unexpected bond with Olga of the Birch Forest ( Anya Taylor-Joy, also in “The Witch”).

Archaeology professor Neil Price, who was a consultant on David Eggers' Viking movie 'The Northman,' described bringing the Viking Age alive on the big ...

“I don’t necessarily agree, but it’s a risk.” This is all to say: The Northman’s costume designer Linda Muir had to get creative with her wardrobe creations. However, Price explained that Eggers was inspired by “stories in which swords are given names that create a personality. “Then you realize what you saw before is not quite what you thought it was—or at least, not what Amleth thought it was.” “Then you see what he does with it.” There are even those who think there was a supernatural element to the rituals the berserkers reportedly performed before battle. “It is different from our reality and it’s quite frightening, but you can see something of yourself in it somewhere—if you want to.” Below, Price offers historical context for The Northman. Eggers wanted to bring those descriptions of men howling like predators to life in The Northman. “Robert lets you see how Amleth’s rage just absolutely consumes him,” Price said. Filling in the gaps was part of the fun for Price, who sent Eggers and the film’s crew “hundreds of images of clothes, buildings, weapons” to help them during pre-production. Director Robert Eggers’ revenge epic The Northman has been called the “ definitive Viking film,” but, funnily enough, no one in the movie ever says the word “Viking.” For archaeology professor Neil Price, one of three historical consultants who worked on The Northman, that felt like a win. “It’s a film where you recalibrate what is going on as you’re seeing it,” Price said. “And might even be older than that.” “There are limits to what historians know about that time.

The director explains why he sought out such difficult conditions, why he won't talk with an actor about a character's back story and why box office ...

With “The Lighthouse,” Pattinson would say sometimes, “Is it this or is it that?” And I said, “You know what? If it’s not the best way to tell the scene, you shouldn’t do it, but when it could be done, we did it because it there is a discipline in it. We did a lot, from a massive village raid with hundreds of extras and stunt guys and horses and cows, to a storm at sea on a Viking ship at night, to a sequence in such a remote location that the cast had to be helicoptered in. Yeah. And also, I don’t indulge in a lot of table work — talking about your character and how they grew up and all that stuff. That was a risk that I was willing to take, but postproduction was hard because I had a pressure and a voice from the studio that I’ve never had before. This movie gave me a more total understanding of the process in a way that I’ve never had before. I know that kids aren’t flocking to Barnes & Noble to get their copies of the Icelandic sagas, but a lot of medieval literature is pretty weird and mystical and out there, and this stuff isn’t. There will not be some longer director’s cut on the Blu-ray. This is the film that I wanted to make. I knew I wasn’t going to have final cut because of the size of the film. But with “The Northman,” it’s challenging because I’m trying to do both. “I learned it when I was shooting ‘The Lighthouse’: You need to have the alpha beard.” I’m excited to have done it, and it was a deliberate choice.

Director Robert Eggers talks about when it's OK to use digital effects, and why it's 'not sinful' that he didn't have Alexander Skarsgård catch a spear in ...

That’s a way of using CG as a tool to tell the story, to stretch your budget, but also keeping it grounded.” “If we’d shot this in the past, it would have been a model,” he says. “Even the Tree of Kings, as Ethan Hawke’s character describes it, the arboreal family lineage hallucination nonsense, was done with practical elements,” Eggers says. The audience’s ability to believe what they’re seeing is Eggers’ main focus when he does use digital effects — he complains about poor effects in the past and how they took people out of the narrative. But you can’t fucking shoot a Viking ship at night in a storm at sea and get exposure. “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,” he says. “I think for the most part, the CG in this film is pretty tasteful,” Eggers says. The answer is no; that spear trick was handled with CG. “Somebody threw a spear from the palisade onto the ground,” Eggers tells Polygon. “And then Alex, in some takes, had a spear the whole time that he would hold up and then throw. “I wasn’t going to start the movie on a fake bird, you know?” he says. The question of CG in The Northman is only relevant because so much of the film was done practically. 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. This is one reason a shot from the trailers, in which warrior protagonist Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) catches a spear thrown by an enemy from atop a fort palisade and throws it back, is particularly startling to see.

A masterful pivot ensued, expanding The Northman's filming locations across Ireland and Northern Ireland to bring Iceland to life, some 900 miles away. We sat ...

We did a lot of scouting and I will say that I feel completely blessed not only for myself—because honestly, it's the greatest vacation ever—but when we came to Northern Ireland and we realized that we had to fake it [more than we had planned], I had a real good sense of what Iceland was. But most of it we erased as we turned around out of the water, and replaced it with the black sand beaches that we were able to photograph and map out digitally, so that we could get that beach scene that we wanted. We went on a scouting expedition to Iceland for a week and a half and that was spectacular.

'The Northman' transports its viewers to the Viking Age, but many can't help but wonder where the historical drama was filmed. Here's what we know.

In an episode of Focus Features' "Reel Destinations," host Alicia Malone reveals that filming took place at Torr Head, "a remote headland" that overlooks the sea. Regarding the farm compound, Craig said there was plenty of building to be done since "Ireland is very wet and marshy." It's a place apparently filled with "myth and legend." According to production designer Craig Lathrop, it was impossible to transport the entire cast and crew to Iceland amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, filming for The Northman occurred primarily across Ireland and Northern Ireland. Now, you might be wondering: Where was The Northman filmed?

Robert Eggers's new Viking epic has a plot that is basically Shakespeare's 'Hamlet,' but here's all the Viking history and Norse mythology that explains the ...

Peter Archer’s The Book of Viking Myths references a document from 921 in which an Arabic traveler named Ibn Fadlan wrote about the funeral of a Viking chieftain where a slave girl was killed and buried along with her master. The brother of Freyja, the goddess of love and beauty, Freyr was widely worshiped in Norse society. In The Northman, Amleth and his father, King Aurvandil (Hawke), drink a potion given to them by their tribe’s shaman, Heimir the Fool (Willem Dafoe). The resulting hallucinatory experience reveals to the young Amleth the nature of the Viking cosmos and his place in it. That’s the ash tree Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, the center of the Viking cosmos. She’s one of the Norns, the female immortals who spun the threads of fate for every human being according to Norse belief. By the time they attacked a village, the berserkers often believed they had transcended their human bodies and become their totem animals (thus the ripping out of throats with bare teeth). Aurvandil is known as the Raven King, and ravens follow Amleth throughout his quest to avenge his father’s death. William Shakespeare took the premise — an exiled prince vows revenge after his uncle kills his father and marries his mother — and used it as the basis for Hamlet. (He also rearranged the letters in the main character’s name.) Norse paganism had a strong element of shamanism, which — to reduce a complex, ancient global practice to one single sentence — allows a worshiper to directly experience the spirit world rather than passively worship it. Those tales are rich with detail, some of which may fly over the heads of viewers who aren’t familiar with Viking culture and beliefs. In the year 914, Amleth boards a ship bound for Iceland, then a sparsely populated Viking settlement less than 50 years old. His scripts are just as dense, incorporating historical and literary sources on both a macro and a line-by-line basis.

The latest from 'The Witch' director Robert Eggers is an ambitious Viking epic full of raw, violent action and vibrant inner emotions.

But Sciamma is able to bring to life essential truths of what it is like to be that strange age and the sometimes frightening, sometimes wonderful vastness of a limitless imagination. You wish the movie wasn’t content to be a feature-length meme and truly deserved what Cage is doing with this long, hard look in the fun-house mirror. For The Times, Katie Walsh wrote, “The real spectacle of the film is Cage, who despite all the ups and downs in his career choices, is an undeniable Movie Star, and when he’s simply playing himself (or the heightened version of himself required here) he’s utterly compelling. In an existential free-fall, Cage accepts a paid invitation to the birthday party of an enigmatic billionaire, Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal), which leads to an entanglement with the CIA, a bond of unexpected friendship and action-adventure straight out of a Nicolas Cage movie. Part of the mystery is that it’s unclear what kind of story this is and where — with its charming child and restrained melancholy — it could be headed. Eggers spoke about what draws him to making deeply reached, meticulously designed historical stories, saying, “What I’m trying to do is make a totally transportive period movie that explores the interior world of the period and makes the interior world and the exterior world a reality. For The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “From this simple, suggestive conceit — and also from the warm, autumnal hues of Claire Mathon’s exquisite images — Sciamma weaves an enchanted reverie, a mystery in miniature that hums with resonance and implication. For the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, “With delicacy, minimal dialogue and lucid, harmoniously balanced images, Sciamma (‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’) invites you into a world that is by turns ordinary and enigmatic. Written and directed by Céline Sciamma, “ Petite Maman” further cements her as one of the most vital filmmakers in the world today. For The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “Happily, Eggers makes movies, not research papers, and his sweet spot is that zone where his art-film idiosyncrasies merge with a genuine flair for Hollywood showmanship. Bogdanovich on TCM. As the TCM Classic Film Festival gets underway in person in Hollywood, the channel is having a five-film tribute to the late Peter Bogdanovich this weekend. Through Casey’s plight of suburban isolation, the artist reaches out to us from a corner of the web’s endless abyss with an unmissable invitation, demonstrating the transcendental prowess of storytelling.”

Are action films with Michelle Yeoh and Nicolas Cage too much for Oscars? Plus, Leonardo DiCaprio's campaign for Scorsese's film confirmed.

While “Crouching Tiger” raked in a robust 10 nominations 22 years ago, there hasn’t been anything else beyond that (at least in the major categories). Films like “Hero” and “House of Flying Daggers” from Zhang Yimou, “Ip Man” from Wilson Yip and “The Raid” from Gareth Evans have been virtually ignored (by regional critics groups as well). For years, there have been calls for the Academy to add a category for stunts, which would be one of the easy and, quite frankly, critical positive changes it can make to its organization and future ceremonies. However, it’ll hope to have a long-lasting impression as we head into the second half of the year, even with decent reviews. “Northman” is a stunning achievement in sound design (even though it can feel like the loudest movie audibly ever constructed) and original score (for Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough). However, it may prove to be too eccentric for mainstream audiences, as the finale brings new meaning to the term “cock fight.” While the movie displays another example of Eggers as an exciting and visionary filmmaker and has a more-than-respectable Rotten Tomatoes score (89%), it’s hard to imagine it could mimic the success of epics like “Gladiator” (2000). Nevertheless, it could be a respectable play for distributor Focus Features in the artisan races. The filmmaking duo also co-produced the film with Anthony and Joe Russo, which we can pray helps the quest for recognition. Variety has exclusively confirmed that despite early rumblings that DiCaprio had switched to a supporting role, he is in fact one of the leads, and will campaign in the lead actor category during the awards season.

It's also a Björk music video. Overrun with psychedelic rituals and an endless stream of blood, the film wouldn't be too out of place in Björk's surreal ...

“I was introduced to Björk by Robin Carolan, who’s one of the composers,” Eggers told GQ. “And then Björk introduced me to Sjón,” the Icelandic poet who co-wrote the script. Although Björk is kind enough to deliver some major plot foreshadowing, Amleth calls her a “Slav witch” and doesn’t flinch once when she opens his grimy palm to place a teardrop in the center. Overrun with psychedelic rituals and an endless stream of blood, the film wouldn’t be too out of place in Björk’s surreal filmography.

A trio of new titles will fight Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore for the top spot this weekend, including Robert Eggers' The Northman.

Cage is experiencing something of a career resurgence, and director Tom Gormican’s film certainly goes out of its way to honor his legacy. The meta-comedy, in which Cage plays a version of himself, made $835,000 in Thursday previews from 3,036 theaters, and is projected to make around $8 million in its opening weekend. The film made $1.35 million in Thursday previews.

Costume designer Linda Muir undertook extensive research to create the historically accurate look of the Viking epic 'The Northman'

I had a notion that we would use the varafeldr at the end, when Gunnar [Elliot Rose] jumps out of the bed box and stabs Amleth, but the blocking in the room just wouldn’t accommodate that, there just wasn’t enough time, the idea was for it to be a complete circle, that the varafeldr was what Flöjnir was wearing when he killed Amleth’s father and that’s what Gunnar would be wrapped in when he’s killed, but you can’t do everything. When I was trying to figure out where in the film there would be a great use for it, I thought, “Oh, in the disguise he dons for the ambush.” Robert and I thought: he’s stolen a helmet from one of his raids and on top of all of that he’s wearing this crazy wookie-like shimmying and shaking cloak. Ours was made in Norway and because of Covid and the furlough, we had enough time to actually make an authentic one. Women in Salvic villages had different temporal rings that identified what village a woman came from, so the notion I went for the character was that wealthy villagers might give her something for private readings. I played around with what colors to use for her because in the daylight you see the Slav villagers wearing garments with red and black embroidery, and with cinematographer Jarin [Blaschke]’s lighting—which was this beautiful moonlight effect from above—it just would have gone to black and it wouldn’t have any detail at all. When Robert and I talked about what the desired aesthetic would be for the film, I was pretty sure that we weren’t going to be able to rent very much, and when I traveled to the various rental houses at the beginning of prep my suspicions were correct. We did hand embroidery for Olga and Amleth’s costumes [the characters played by Anna Taylor-Joy and Alexander Skarsgård], as well as for a group of villagers that surrounded them, and then we did machine embroidery for the crowds. We then took photographs of that embroidery and then screened it so that the Seeress is completely covered in embroidery because she had to be considered the über writer. Our costume coordinator Louise Cassettari was constantly shifting to figure things out and finding a supply of plain woven wool for the massive number of characters we had to dress. If you start to read what archaeologists believe and combine that with how you would practically make something, you can start to figure out how a piece of wool needs to be in particular dimensions in order to create that image I see in those tapestries. Our costume crew in Northern Ireland was astonishing and I think the Slavic village really benefited from the amount of mud that everybody was wading through. Then I would glean from the Sagas very specific and fabulous pieces of information that Robert was also aware of such as that characters, as a sort of foretelling, would wear dark cloaks before there was a murder.

Guest host John Horn and KPCC film critics Amy Nicholson, Peter Rainer and Charles Solomon review this weekend's new movie releases on streaming and on ...

It’s rated R and in theaters now. “The Northman” is rated R and in theaters now. “The Northman” is set in the age of Vikings, a common theme in popular entertainment today.

Did the Vikings really do hallucinogens, human sacrifices, and werewolf bar mitzvahs?

And the current favorite historian’s hypothesis is that it was just something to look cool, to look badass, and that they filled those grooves with some kind of pigment. The naked sword fight on a volcano is something that I just wanted to do, and it seemed elemental, and it seemed right. Based on the research that I’ve done, I’m sure a Viking would say, “This is nonsense.” But how I was able to justify it is that it seems to me in the Viking Age, nudity was pretty taboo. It’s very often a magic sword, and they have to fight the undead owner of the sword in the burial mound. The assumption in both this funeral and the funeral Ibn Fadlan witnessed is that this unmarried, dead Viking man needs a bride to be with him in the other world. It’s very common for a saga hero to get his sword from a burial mound, and it’s very often that they break into the mound to get their sword. Whereas, this character in our film is a worshiper of Freyr, so the ship is half-buried in the earth, the way we think the Oseberg funeral in Norway [ which resulted in the preservation of the tapestry with the tree on it, among other finds] was carried out. In Iceland, Amleth finds a shaman in a cave who tells him where his sword is, and that shaman uses a preserved head of Willem Dafoe’s character, Heimir the Fool, to deliver his message. But the Oseberg tapestry is a visual story that we actually have from the Viking Age. And one of the images on there is this arboreal structure, covered with hanging bodies. The more current theory that we’re using in the film is that it was a shamanic war dance that got them into this trance. Son of, son of, son of, son of, son of, son of, son of, and so on. The New Yorker says it was in the smoke, in this scene, but that’s wrong, it’s actually in the stuff that they’re drinking.

THE NORTHMAN (Theaters). Director Robert Eggers (“The Lighthouse”) manages to replicate a blood-soaked medieval saga of Vikings, marauders and slaves in an ...

Differences aside—there are plenty of them—Eggers and cowriter Sjón add an explicit Yorick reference in the form of Heimir. So explicit, in fact, that there's ...

I probably would have saved my ears from some serious damage, and I would have left on the high note of Dafoe in his element: being the weird little guy that cinema deserves. The strangeness doesn’t stop after Heimir is gone, but it’s a lot less fun, resulting in an uncomfortable cadence of bit parts briefly rescuing the film before it slips back into relative normalcy. He clearly knows that Dafoe is an ace in the hole, yet he doesn’t utilize the actor to his full potential. But mine was a euphoric descent, a willing submission to the chaos unfolding in front of me. Differences aside—there are plenty of them—Eggers and cowriter Sjón add an explicit Yorick reference in the form of Heimir. So explicit, in fact, that there’s even a scene later in the film when Prince Amleth (get it?) beholds Heimir’s skull and sighs, “Poor Heimir.” Although Hamlet never shows Yorick alive, The Northman ensures that we absolutely get to see Heimir in the prime of his lifetime—making dick jokes and officiating psychedelic “werewolf bar mitzvahs.” It’s fantastic stuff, powered by Dafoe unleashing a level of weird-little-guy energy previously unknown to man. My friend told me it’s “a combination of magnetism and revulsion.” But I propose an alternative: It’s Willem Dafoe as Heimir the Fool, The Northman’s secret weapon.

DreamWorks Animation and Universal's The Bad Guys, directed by Pierre Perifel and adapted by Etan Cohen, topped the domestic box office with a $7.7 million ...

It’s a fun movie, but it’s also a nostalgia project for a time when a film like this was indeed theatrically practical. Call it a (likely) loss for distribution but a win for theaters. Budget aside, that would be a decent showing for a movie of this nature even in pre-Covid times. It'll be their biggest non-sequel debut since The Boss Baby ($50 million) in early 2017. Considering the struggles, even pre-Covid, for non-sequel toons, we haven’t had an original animated blockbuster since Coca in late 2017, I’ll count The Bad Guys (based on Aaron Blabey’s kid-lit series) as a relative triumph for now. But it’s also not 2009, back when Monsters Vs. Aliens would cost $175 million and the entire world wasn’t zoned out on Twitter, YouTube and Netflix. In 2022, this is a particularly good opening weekend for a non-sequel animated film.

From Viking history to Icelandic geography, "The Northman" is loaded with details. Feeling overwhelmed? Start here.

The plot of “The Northman” is fairly straightforward, and you only really need to grasp the events of the first act to get the gist of it. While he didn’t shoot on location, Eggers imagined the setting of the showdown as Mount Hekla, a 4,891-foot active volcano in southern Iceland. It wasn’t until the 12th century that an eruption led Europeans to refer to it as the “Gateway to Hell,” well after events of “The Northman,” but that’s one creative liberty that seemed justified given the memorable results. Costume designer Muir, who also worked on “The Lighthouse” and “The Witch,” assembled no less than 918 hand-sewn garments to resemble outfits from the era. Described by costume designer Linda Muir as “the Uber-communicator for her village,” the Seeress is something of a two-way translator between men and their fates; the elaborate patterns embroidered onto her open-skirt relate the stories of her people, while the cowrie shells that replace her missing eyes allow her to relate the visions she receives from above. Appearing in her first narrative film role since her iconic performance in 2000’s “Dancer in the Dark,” the Icelandic mega-star makes a brief yet crucial appearance as an otherworldly Slavic Seeress who appears to Amleth after a bloodthirsty raid and refocuses the berserker’s attention on his errant uncle Fjölnir. With “The Northman,” Eggers decided that it was time to go back to the source. Sjón’s prolific output has taken many forms and genres, including the prize-winning gay Spanish flu bestseller “Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was.” Before “The Northman,” he co-wrote the script for Cannes prize-winner “Lamb,” a creepy farm thriller starring Noomi Rapace that became Iceland’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar. Both “Lamb” and “The Northman” are in tune with Icelandic scenery and atmosphere as only an insider could envision them. While no actual poem has survived the intervening centuries and other versions have popped up (from a pair of 12th century Latin versions and even a 17th century from Iceland that’s more “modern”), the primary source of the story is Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus’ grand Danish history, “Gesta Danorum,” which he completed in the early 13th century. In the classic Amleth tale that Saxo details in his comprehensive history, Amleth is the son of King Horvendill and Queen Gerutha, but he’s murdered by his jealous younger brother Feng, who convinced Gerutha that the killing was a good thing. More than that, though, “The Northman” is a vivid tribute to the sword-and-sandals genre that elevates it to high art. Plenty more happens in Saxo’s version — there’s an entire subplot about a “terrible Scottish queen” that he also woos, and a plan from his other father-in-law to off him — but Amleth remains a cunning hero to the last. This handy guide to “The Northman” should help you appreciate the many layers of cinematic experiences it offers up.