The Northman: Robert Eggers’ Viking Take on the Legend Behind Hamlet

Robert Eggers digs back past Shakespeare to the Scandinavian saga of Amleth, and shoots it on the same Icelandic ground where the story was first told. The result is a revenge film with the period obsessiveness of The Witch and The Lighthouse and a studio budget that lets the volcanoes show up on camera.

Eggers builds his films like a reenactor with a research library — historical garments, candlelight where the script calls for candlelight, dialogue stress-tested for the period. With The Northman he points that approach at the Viking world, taking as his source the medieval Scandinavian legend of Amleth that Shakespeare later reworked into Hamlet. The film opens in a 10th-century kingdom, follows the murder of a king by his brother, and tracks the dead king’s young son into exile and adulthood, where revenge is the only word for what is left.

Amleth grows up among Slavic raiders on the eastern steppes. A seeress puts him back on the path he chose as a boy, and he infiltrates the household of his uncle Fjölnir, who now farms sheep in the Icelandic interior with the widow Gudrún and a new son. From there the film moves like a saga — slow, ritualised, brutal — toward the confrontation it has been promising from its first scene.

Eggers wrote the script with Sjón, the Icelandic poet and novelist whose work runs deep in the country’s literary tradition. That collaboration shows in the small things — the names, the verse forms, the way the gods speak — and in the larger choice to film entirely on location in Iceland, Ireland and Northern Ireland between August and December 2020. Few mid-budget studio pictures at this scale have looked this much like the place they are set.

Alexander Skarsgård carries Amleth through the picture as a man stripped of language, then of any softer instinct. Nicole Kidman plays his mother Gudrún with a turn in the back half that is the film’s quietest provocation. Anya Taylor-Joy is the Slav slave Olga, the one figure in Amleth’s path who is not part of the fate machinery. Claes Bang plays the uncle Fjölnir. Willem Dafoe and Björk appear in smaller roles as the figures who steer Amleth onto and off the path of revenge.

The camera work, by Jarin Blaschke, favours long handheld takes that hold a moment past the point most films would cut. The score, by Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough, is built from drums, horns and choral textures that move with the action rather than comment on it. A few sequences — a raid on a settlement, a duel on a steaming volcanic ridge — are staged less to thrill than to insist that this is what these moments would have looked like.

The Northman does not read as Hamlet with axes. It reads as the older, harsher story Shakespeare softened. The interesting tension of the film is between Eggers’ arthouse instincts and a studio-scale release that mostly handles this material as either Marvel-shaped action or sword-and-sandal pastiche.

Whether the wider theatrical audience follows Eggers this far back into pre-Christian Scandinavian myth is the open question. The film has been made on the assumption that some of them will.

Tags: nicole kidman, Willem Dafoe, Ethan Hawke, Alexander Skarsgård, Björk, Robert Eggers, The Northman