The Northman

I remember sitting in the third row of a half-empty theater in April 2022, watching Alexander Skarsgård catch a spear out of mid-air and hurl it back at his enemies, and thinking: How on earth did a studio give someone 70 million dollars to make this? In an era where every third movie involves a multiversal portal or a wisecracking superhero, Robert Eggers—the man who made us fear goats in The Witch (2015)—convinced Regency Enterprises to fund a hyper-violent, historically accurate Viking epic that feels less like a movie and more like a fever dream experienced while buried in wet mud.

I actually watched the first twenty minutes of this film while my neighbor was loudly assembling IKEA furniture through the common wall, and the rhythmic thwack-thwack-thwack of his rubber mallet accidentally synchronized with the ritualistic drumming in the score. It was the most immersive 4D experience I’ve had all decade.

A Masterclass in Grime and Gore

The plot is the oldest story in the book—literally. It’s based on the Norse legend of Amleth, the same source material that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) witnesses his father, King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), get butchered by his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang). Amleth flees, grows up into a human brick house of a man, and returns to Iceland under the guise of a slave to take his bloody revenge.

But Robert Eggers isn't interested in a clean, heroic arc. This is action cinema at its most punishing. The village raid sequence is a single-take miracle of choreography that avoids the "shaky-cam" nonsense that plagues modern blockbusters. You see every swing of the axe, every drop of sweat, and the terrifying physical commitment of Skarsgård, who looks like he spent the entire production eating nothing but raw elk and pure rage. The movie is basically 'Hamlet' if Shakespeare had been obsessed with protein shakes and mud-wrestling.

The action here has a weight that CGI-heavy franchises often lack. When someone gets hit, you feel the bone-crunching impact. The sound design by Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough is a wall of throat singing and guttural bellows that makes your teeth rattle. It’s loud, it’s proud, and it’s deeply weird.

The Weirdness is the Point

What separates The Northman from something like Gladiator (2000) is its refusal to modernize the characters' mindsets. Amleth isn't a "relatable" hero; he’s a guy who truly believes his fate is woven by three women at a loom and that he needs to find a magic sword that can only be unsheathed at night. This commitment to the era's mysticism is where Anya Taylor-Joy (reunited with Eggers after The Witch) shines as Olga of the Birch Forest. She brings a sharp, cunning energy that balances the brute force of the men.

Then there’s Nicole Kidman. For the first hour, you think she’s playing the standard "damsel in distress" mother, but then she delivers a mid-movie monologue that absolutely flips the script. It’s a brave, jagged performance that reminds you why she’s one of the best in the business. It’s also worth noting the brief, bizarre appearance of Björk as a Seeress—her first film role in ages—which adds to the sense that you’re watching something that shouldn't exist in the mainstream landscape of 2022.

The Last of its Kind?

Despite the critical acclaim, The Northman struggled at the box office, barely recouping its production budget. In the current "theatrical vs. streaming" war, it became a poster child for the "difficult" mid-budget adult epic. Audiences used to the fast-paced quips of the MCU were perhaps caught off guard by a film where men bark like dogs and fight naked on the edge of a volcano.

However, like many films that "fail" financially, it has already found a massive second life on VOD and streaming platforms. It’s a modern cult classic in the making. It represents a moment where a director was given the keys to the kingdom and used them to build a monument to historical accuracy and primal violence. Watching this movie feels like being punched in the face by a history textbook, and I mean that as a sincere compliment. It’s an uncompromising vision in a decade of compromised products.

The behind-the-scenes trivia alone is a testament to the madness: Skarsgård reportedly stayed in character so intensely that he would huff and puff between takes like a literal beast, and the production had to use 1,500 extras and a custom-built Viking village in Northern Ireland that looked so real locals thought a museum had moved in.

The Northman is a rare beast—a big-budget film with a soul made of iron and dirt. It won't be for everyone; it’s too grim for some and too strange for others. But if you want to see what happens when an obsessed historian is given a Hollywood budget to film a revenge tragedy, this is the pinnacle. It’s a film that demands to be seen on the biggest screen possible, if only to appreciate the sheer scale of the Icelandic landscape and Alexander Skarsgård’s terrifying traps.