By: Mateen Rizvi

Review| The "Northman" is brutal and violent but there is something really beautiful about it

When Eggers initially released "The Witch," his style of horror was dubbed "elevated" in a backhanded way. With a new devil-may-care pleasure for the dark, the New England filmmaker presented genre-breaking frights that pushed the auditory and visual boundaries of otherworldly anguish. Eggers combines his traditional interests in the intrinsic weirdness that runs through ancient legend with slicker aesthetics and bigger emotions, played out on a grander scale, in "The Northman." It tells the story of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgrd), a huge, infuriated Viking warrior prince seeking vengeance for a lost Scandinavian country. This legend is most known to modern audiences by its well-known English rendition, Hamlet, which depicts unyielding Amleth's determination to reclaim his usurped throne, which is as brutal as the scorching countryside.

A Viking prince demonstrates his worthiness by farting, then levitates while his father's innards transform into a mystical fortune-telling tree in the film The Northman. A frantic Valkyrie rides a white horse over the sky, and Björk plays a witch with no eyes and a wheat-sheaf headpiece. Noses are bitten off, throats are ripped out, and a man staggers into a fire with handfuls of his own guts in his hands. This isn't your average Friday night at the movies. Despite all of the aforementioned oddity and brutality, The Northman isn't nearly bizarre or violent enough.

However, this isn't your average hero's trip with a dashing royal. Amleth lives in a harsher, kill-or-be-killed era, where there is no greater honour for a monarch than to die by the blade. His father, King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke), worships this reality by preparing his young son for the possibility of bloodshed: a carnal ritual taking place in a smoky, otherworldly cavern that includes a mystical invocation to the ancestors led by Heimir the Fool (an unhinged Willem Dafoe), in which Amleth and Aurvandill whoop and holler on all fours like We're all just rabid creatures living in flabby sacks of human skin in "The Northman's" world. Our sole responsibilities are to avenge our fathers and to defend our mothers and kingdoms. It's an oath taken by his mother, Queen Gudrn (Nicole Kidman), but disregarded by his uncle, the imposing black-bearded Fjölnir (Claes Bang), who, of course, brings tragedy to young Amleth's life by murdering his father and banishing him to far-flung shores, where he grows into a bitter, musclebound warrior.

Much of the movie, which was shot by Jarin Blaschke and edited by Louise Ford (both of whom worked with Eggers on "The Lighthouse" and "The Witch"), relies on a polished visual flare, with the filmmaker employing more camera movement than normal. Amleth and a band of skin-clad Vikings wearing bear-pelt headdresses rampage a village for kills in a horrific sequence edited with razor-sharp clarity by Ford. The scene's intricate tracking shot satisfies the camera's voracious thirst for flesh with bodies bathed in blood, as well as the bone-chilling macho yells emerging from insatiable men. A burning house filled with sobbing peasants serves as a backdrop to Amleth's uncompromising gaze into the camera in one image, which recalls Elem Klimov's antiwar film "Come and See."

"The Northman" is the kind of movie where even the mud has rage. It is a visceral film loaded with codas to the inescapable darker regions of nature: animal, elemental, and the harshest of all, human. As ambient reverbs and decaying delays reach back to primordial origins, they all pulse through Eggers' distinctive twisted soundscapes and Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough's haunting music. The trippy hypnotic dreamscapes take a similar approach: Amleth's family tree, an ever-evolving stand-in for divine rule, is rendered as a blue luminous artery fern sprouting from his heart and connecting to ours by the crack VFX team. It's one of the many magical strands that entwine and occasionally tangle in "The Northman," a film in which Björk plays a blind seer who guides Amleth to a hidden treasure.

It's a lot gentler than The Lighthouse, straddling the line between an experimental art project and a mainstream Nordic answer to Gladiator. It's also less violent than David Lowery's The Green Knight, which was released last year. The Green Knight and The Northman have a lot in common. Both are earthy yet surreal swords 'n' sorcery adventures based on mediaeval tales, with witches, giants, eerie banqueting halls, and heads being lopped off left, right, and centre. The Green Knight, on the other hand, was so strikingly gorgeous and disorienting that The Northman looks rather mundane in comparison.