The Northman: Eggers’s Viking Revenge Epic Holds Its Nerve

Robert Eggers goes back to AD 895 with The Northman, to the North Atlantic island of Hrafnsey, where a Viking prince named Amleth watches his father die and then builds his whole life around making someone pay for it.

The film runs 137 minutes. It is an action, adventure and fantasy picture with a tagline that states its thesis in three words: “Conquer your fate.” Eggers wrote the screenplay with Sjón, working from the legend of Amleth in Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum. Alexander Skarsgård plays the grown Amleth. Both men produced.

This is a revenge story with no interest in pretending otherwise, and that is exactly why it works.

Trailer, via Focus Features.

King Aurvandill and the Ceremony at Hrafnsey

The opening act does the work fast. King Aurvandill War-Raven, played by Ethan Hawke, returns to Hrafnsey and reunites with Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman) and his heir, Prince Amleth. To prepare the boy for the throne, father and son take part in a ceremony overseen by the king’s jester, Heimir — Willem Dafoe, doing the kind of strange, committed work the role demands.

Heimir tells Amleth his destiny is fixed and cannot be escaped. Amleth vows to avenge his father if Aurvandill is ever slain, rather than live in shame. The next morning, his bastard uncle Fjölnir stages a palace coup, beheads Aurvandill, sacks the hillfort and carries off Gudrún. Amleth narrowly escapes Fjölnir’s assassins and flees by boat, swearing vengeance.

That is the whole engine. Everything after it is consequence.

A Berserker, a Seeress and a Slave Ship to Iceland

Years later, Amleth is an adult ulfhéðinn — a berserker — in a band of Vikings. After sacking a village in Garðaríki, he meets a Seeress in the temple of Svetovit. She orders him to remember his oath and tells him his fate is intertwined with that of a Maiden-King.

He then learns that Fjölnir the Brotherless, played by Claes Bang, has lost his throne to Harald of Norway and now farms sheep in Iceland. Amleth brands himself a thrall, sneaks aboard a ship bound for Iceland, and meets an enslaved Slavic woman named Olga, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, who claims to be a sorceress.

They are taken to Fjölnir’s farm. There Amleth learns his mother married Fjölnir and bore him a son, Gunnar. When most of the slaves are rejected as defective, Amleth shows his strength and aggression to impress Fjölnir, who keeps him and Olga — her for her beauty, him for what he can do.

The Cast Around Skarsgård

Skarsgård carries the film, but the supporting parts are stacked, and the film knows it. Bang plays Fjölnir as a man who won and then kept losing anyway. Taylor-Joy’s Olga is the one character who matches Amleth’s will without sharing his death wish.

The wider ensemble includes Gustav Lindh as Thórir the Proud, Elliott Rose as Gunnar, Phill Martin as Hallgrímr Half-Troll, Eldar Skar as Finnr the Nose-Stub, Olwen Fouéré as Áshildur Hofgythja, and Edgar Abram as Hersveinn Battle-Hard. Björk appears among the cast as well.

Norse mythology runs through all of it — not as decoration but as the operating system. The film’s characters believe fate is a thing you can name and then walk toward. The Northman takes that belief seriously enough to build its ending on it.

Release Dates and the Box Office Ledger

The box office line is the one that needs care. The film grossed either $75.8 million or $69.6 million against a net budget of $70 million — the sources disagree, and the lower figure puts it under water on theatrical alone. Reviews were positive. That did not save it at the box office.

Then something else happened. The Northman found an unexpected amount of financial success on VOD and home media, recouping a large portion of its box office take after theaters were done with it. That is the detail worth holding onto. A film this strange, this committed to its own register, got a second life from people watching it at home.

Filming took place across Iceland, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland from August to December 2020, with much of the cast joining in October 2019. Eggers and Skarsgård met to discuss possible collaborations; Skarsgård had wanted to make a Viking film for several years, and Eggers decided to make this his third project after that meeting. You can feel that patience in the result.

What matters here is not the gross. It is that a $70 million Viking revenge epic with a Seeress, a warlock and a fixed destiny got made at all, and that it holds its nerve for 137 minutes without winking at the audience once. The Northman is Eggers’s most direct film and his most physical — a story about a man who was told as a boy that he could not escape what was coming, and who decides that if he cannot escape it, he will at least run at it head-on.

That is a narrow idea. The film never pretends otherwise, and it never apologizes. It earns its ending.

Metacritic: 82/100.

Alexander Skarsgård · Anya Taylor-Joy · movie review · Robert Eggers · The Northman · Viking movie