Robert Egger’s Viking epic The Northman came out in April 2022 and, much like The Green Knight, was a movie that I was left feeling undecided on when it came time for my best of 2022 article. It did make its way on the list in the end, in combination with me thinking about the film more than other films, trying to decipher my feelings towards it and because I hadn’t seen Banshees of Inisherin yet, which would have been one of my best films of the year and easily in the top five, if not top three, had I seen it in time. Considering my feelings towards The Northman, I opted to give it another go a year and a half later to see if my opinion changed. I’m glad to see that it did change, but in a way, I don’t think I liked it as much the second time around as I did the first time.

What Worked

That’s not to say The Northman doesn’t have its strengths. Chief among them are the cinematography. I didn’t give this much love in my original review but man, this movie looks good. The highlight of course is when Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) partakes in a raid on a village in the lands of Rus. Goodness, that was a scene. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke uses a lot of tracking long shots for the sequence, allowing us the audience to almost be participating in the slaughter. The camera largely follows Amleth, who refuses to kill innocents, as he carves a bloody path from outside the village, over the walls into the heart of the chaos itself. It only lasts a few minutes but it’s certainly memorable and is one of the best action scenes of 2022, if not the best. The visuals overall are largely great, with wonderful vistas, haunting imagery and a supernatural ghostly presence that makes the movie feel otherworldly at times. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if The Northman is a grounded historical epic or a fantastical one, but I like that it’s ambiguous.

The Northman also has a pretty solid score courtesy of Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough which captures the sometimes ethereal and mystical aspects of the film. The film is known for having many scenes that would be classified as “weird” or “trippy” and the score leans into that in a way that could be called haunting and atmospheric but most importantly, authentic. The Norse were deeply spiritual so the music, heavy on chanting and throat vocals, feels pulled from the annals of history. I’m still mixed on the tone of the movie, especially the abstract weirdness, not from a narrative point of view, but that the film’s $90 million dollar didn’t justify such abstract styles. The TV show Vikings also showcased how bizarre the Norse are from our modern point of view, but I don’t think it alienated audiences as much. I know The Northman’s tone was deliberate in an attempt to replicate the Sagas, but at $90 million, I think the film should have been less ambiguous. Granted, this is also Robert Egger’s most accessible movie (he’s also directed The Witch and The Lighthouse), so that should be noted as well. Also, ironically, The Northman is a much more historically accurate offering than Vikings despite it’s fantastical premises, but despite that, the show did have a better sense of pacing and immersion for audiences; at least until Vikings started bloating its seasons with twice the amount of episodes by releasing seasons in two parts.

What Doesn’t Work

The Northman is ultimately a revenge story, one that is interesting and challenges the audience with regard to the portrayal of Amleth as a hero or a misguided beast, but it really suffers from pacing issues. This is a nearly two-and-a-half-hour movie and it really feels it, especially in the middle. I feel like Eggers and his editor should have brought this movie into a tight one-hour forty-five-minute runtime for the sake of pacing and focus. Too often the movie feels like it’s wandering away from the core story to meander without much in the way of payoff. The cast was overall really solid, but Nicole Kidman was seriously miscast as Amleth’s mother, especially since she’s only nine years older than Skarsgård and has played his wife before on HBO’s excellent Big Little Lies. That aside, her performance did leave something to be desired.

Likewise, the revenge tale does end up feeling a bit uninspired, as we’ve seen countless revenge stories over the decades and they all riff on the same themes, so The Northman doesn’t end up feeling that unique, despite its visual and tonal styles. The film abandons Amleth’s Berzerker path fairly early on after the time jump in favour of the revenge story and that’s a shame, as the Berzerker element is quite unique and visually more raw and engaging. Seeing the ritual chanting of having the warriors “shed their skin” to become animals before battle is something I had never seen before and I can’t help but wonder what this movie could have been had it opted to focus on a man losing his humanity thanks to his animalistic tendencies. He can still be on the path to revenge, but I found the whole Berzerker world and look (the main promo images, posters and covers for The Northman all feature this iteration of the lead) was far more interesting than the Amleth posing as a slave at the farm.

The part of the narrative on the farm is also a weird pivot based on previous scenes upon the rewatching of The Northman. Amleth spends years preparing for the chance of revenge and is a recognized and respected Berzerker warrior. Yet he opts to pose as a slave and slowly rip apart his uncle’s farm and (eventually) his family from within. I get the angle, but considering Amleth’s background, why not just ask the other Berzerkers to raid his uncle’s farm in a head-on assault? He could pitch it as a need for honour and it would make the Gods happy and I’m sure the others would travel with him, resulting in a much quicker confrontation instead of the slow attempt at subterfuge that ultimately doesn’t go quite as planned as he kills his mother and youngest half-brother in accidental self-defense. I think a lot of the themes and narrative beats could happen if he wasn’t posing as a slave too, such as Amleth dying while fighting his Uncle Fjölnir, the visions of his children with Olga and the revelations that his mother plotted the entire conspiracy that set his destiny in motion, but based on the runtime and the establishment of Amleth, I really found the slow burn revenge plot ran counter to Amleth as a character.

It was still really interesting to rewatch this movie that I recognized as conflicting when it came out and I really want to do the same for The Green Knight, a movie that I was even more conflicted on.