The Northman

The Northman is a Norse saga brought to the big screen. If you don’t really know what that means, I would brace yourself, it’s a rather different sort of storytelling than your typical Hollywood movie, even though it’s pretty heavily focussed on a leading man.

While there are action scenes, you should possibly go in thinking Shakespearean tragedy more than than Die Hard (although the language is much more modern than most Shakespeare you see on screen) and you should mix that with a big dose of interacting with the Gods, vision questing and the like, and what I’m loosely going to call swords and sandals combat scenes. This is historically wrong (and while I quibble about the size of their shields, they get the history of the combat pretty decent) but it sets the right sort of mental image. This makes it quite trippy in quite a few places, and maybe thinking Rambo crossed with Hamlet on acid gets you closer to the right place - there’s a strong revenge thread running though this story.

The BBFC gives warnings for strong, bloody gore (totally justified), nudity (just about justified - there are some bums shown), sexual violence (really very implied, thankfully), and sex scenes (present, but really mild). If you don’t want gory violence, this isn’t the movie for you!

The set is frequently gorgeous, but the setting is really lush - it’s clearly NOT Iceland. There are title cards between acts. Just for fun they’re written in Futhark. And what I assume is Old Norse. I can read some of it, Islant is pretty easy to work out when you know they’re going to Iceland, but a lot is harder to read in the time you get. There are English subtitles to help you along though.

I would say that there is really very little that feels new here in terms of the major plot arc. Maybe that enhances the feeling of it being an arthouse movie too. However, the pieces they’ve chosen certainly fit together really well as a saga, and they’re told well. Part of the difference between a tragedy and a tragic story is that we can see the inevitable doom that is to befall the protagonist building, so the fact that you’re likely to understand the plot, for me, added to that sense of every growing inevitable doom more than leaving me feeling bored and as if it was derivative.

If you’re happy with a story that takes it time, spans decades and is probably more akin to arthouse cinema than mainstream cinema, but was made with big budget special effects - lots of bodies in some of the fights, some freaky special effects in dream walks and the like, then builds to its inevitable tragedy - then it’s a great way to spend a couple of hours.

Bechdel Test: Fail. There are actually quite a few women around, but they’re mostly unnamed - they’re slaves. The few named women don’t get to talk to each other.

Ko Test: Fail. Although inaccurate in this version of history, there are no POC, men or women. It’s arguable, given the set up, this could happen.

Russo Test: Fail. We don’t see the sexuality of a lot of the characters (you can certainly read a group of them as gay) but those for whom we know their sexuality are all straight.