the northman movie review 2022

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Describing “The Northman” as director Robert Eggers' most accessible film verges on misleading. The filmmaker's prior works—the puritanical hallucinations of “ The Witch ” and the desolate, mermaid fetishization of “ The Lighthouse ”—traded in traditional macabre American folklore for unconventional, ambient freak-outs. “The Northman” repeats the best instincts of those films, though to lesser effect. It demands audiences deconstruct overbearing patriarchal values, toxic masculine heroism, and the folly of revenge by pulling viewers through extreme devotion to familial honor. Eggers’ brand of psychological shock is bolder here than his prior works and potent in bursts, but barely works on boldness alone.

When Eggers first released “The Witch” his brand of horror was deemed, backhandedly, as “elevated.” The New England filmmaker delivered genre-breaking frights with a fresh devil-may-care glee for the sinister that pushed the sonic and visual possibilities of supernatural angst. With “The Northman,” Eggers uses slicker aesthetics and broader emotions, played out over a grander scale, with his familiar interests in the inherent weirdness that courses through ancient mythology. It’s the tale of Amleth ( Alexander Skarsgård ), a hulking, enraged Viking warrior prince who’s seeking retribution for a lost kingdom in Scandinavia. Modern audiences will know this legend by its well-known English adaptation, Hamlet , recalling unbreakable Amleth’s resolve, as unforgiving as the punishing landscape, to earn back his usurped crown. 

This isn’t a prototypical hero’s journey replete with a dashing royal, however. Amleth occupies a different, harsher kill-or-be-killed era where no higher honor can befall a king than to die by the blade. His father King Aurvandill ( Ethan Hawke ), recently returned from war, damaged and wounded, worships this reality by preparing his young son for the eventuality of bloodshed: a carnal ritual taking place in a smoky, otherworldly cavern that involves a mystical invocation to the ancestors led by Heimir the Fool (an unhinged Willem Dafoe ), whereby Amleth and Aurvandill whoop and holler on all fours like wolves. In the world of “The Northman” we’re all just rabid animals occupying flabby sacks of human skin. The only obligations we have are primal: to avenge one’s father, and to defend one’s mother and kingdom. It’s an oath similarly taken by his mother Queen Gudrún ( Nicole Kidman ) and ignored by his uncle, the imposing black-bearded Fjölnir ( Claes Bang ), who, of course, brings tragedy to young Amleth’s life by killing his father—forcing him to far-flung shores where he becomes a bitter, musclebound warrior.  

Much of the film, lensed by Jarin Blaschke and edited by Louise Ford (Eggers' collaborators on “The Lighthouse” and “The Witch”), rests on a polished visual flair, exercising more camera movement than usual for the director. A vicious sequence involving Amleth and a band of skin-clad Vikings, covered in bear-pelt headdresses, edited with razor-sharp clarity by Ford, sees the pack methodically rampaging a village for kills. The elaborate tracking shot accompanying the scene feeds the camera’s delirious appetite for flesh with bodies bathed in blood, and the bone-chilling macho screams emanating from insatiable men. One shot, recalling Elem Klimov’s antiwar flick “ Come and See ,” finds a burning house filled with wailing villagers as a backdrop to Amleth’s unflinching gaze into the camera. Unlike Klimov’s film, this isn’t the image of a boy horrifically marked by war. This is a savage and defiant man fueled by conflict and gore.  

"The Northman" is the kind of movie where even the mud has rage; it is a visceral film filled with codas to the inescapable darker regions of nature: animal, elemental and the harshest of all, human. They all vibrate through Eggers’ signature warped soundscapes and Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough ’s brooding score, as ambient reverbs and decaying delays reach back toward primordial origins. The trippy hypnotic dreamscapes attempt a similar reach: the crack VFX team render Amleth’s family tree, an ever-evolving stand-in for divine rule, as a blue glowing arterial fern arising from his heart while connecting to ours. It’s one of the many magical tendrils intertwining, and sometimes knotting up, “The Northman,” a film where Björk portrays a blind seer pointing Amleth toward a sword with a dull-less blade and an unquenchable thirst for death. 

David Lowery ’s “ The Green Knight ” will probably serve as an all-too-easy comparison for many. But “The Northman” operates on a different emotional spectrum. This is a story of blind ambition stretched toward morally oblique ends in a world that prizes such malleability. That doesn’t mean these flawed characters don’t see themselves on the side of right. A virtuous anger fuels Amleth. And in a culture that’s weeded out male vulnerability, it’s down to Skarsgård to translate this man’s repressed emotions to a palpable rage. His romance with Olga ( Anya Taylor-Joy , reuniting with Eggers), an enslaved potion maker equally searching for revenge against Fjölnir, isn’t filled with amorous sweet nothings. You show love, you make the erotic a reality, and allow your horny rage to take centerstage by killing. And Amleth does plenty of blade swinging. These are fully committed performances by Skarsgård, Taylor-Joy, and especially Kidman, in a period piece filled with outright absurdity and silly suggestive one-liners.      

In that regard, “The Northman” often stumbles when it searches for profundity. As much as Eggers and his co-writer, the poet and novelist Sjón (“Lamb”), want to interrogate the place of women in these myths, that component bobs unmoored just below the surface. Outside of one spell, Olga remains within the confines of genre conventions without wholly subverting them. The last act is a slog, composed of a couple false endings hoping to attain a poetic plain. The final showdown between Fjölnir and Amleth, in the mouth of a volcano, in fact, is somehow anti-climactic. Certainly, the scene aims to explain the ways a hero’s journey, the expectation of fulfilling one’s destiny, no matter the consequences, carries a toxic burden, but the sentiment doesn’t translate in the overstated molten brouhaha.

Instead, this gory Viking tale works when considering its parts, but never really as a whole. The parts, however, are so thrilling, so uniquely calibrated to feverish, determined ends, that they elevate the entire film. Because how can one complain about the "too muchness" of the Valkyries? How can one scoff at the dizzying, unexplainable flights of magic? Where would the fun be in that? “The Northman” makes you happy it exists, even if you’re not totally happy with it. 

In theaters exclusively on April 22.   

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the  New York Times ,  IndieWire , and  Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the  Los Angeles Times , and  Rolling Stone  about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

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Film Credits

The Northman (2022)

137 minutes

Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth

Nicole Kidman as Queen Gudrún

Claes Bang as Fjölnir the Brotherless

Ethan Hawke as King Aurvandil War-Raven

Anya Taylor-Joy as Olga of the Birch Forest

Gustav Lindh as Thórir the Proud

Elliott Rose as Gunnar

Willem Dafoe as Heimir the Fool

Björk as The Seeress

Rebecca Ineson as Halla the Maiden

Kate Dickie as Halldora the Pict

Ralph Ineson as Captain Volodymyr

• Robert Eggers

Director of Photography

• Jarin Blaschke
• Louise Ford

Original Music Composer

• Sebastian Gainsborough
• Robin Carolan

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‘The Northman’ Review: Danish Premodern

Alexander Skarsgard, Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicole Kidman star in Robert Eggers’s bloody Viking revenge saga.

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By A.O. Scott

“The Northman” tells a very old story — maybe the same old story. A young prince seeks to avenge the murder of his father, the king, whose killer has usurped the throne and married the prince’s mother. That’s “Hamlet,” of course, but Robert Eggers’s new film isn’t another Shakespeare screen adaptation, bristling with Elizabethan eloquence, high-toned acting and complex, uncannily modern psychology.

Eggers, who wrote the screenplay with the Icelandic novelist and playwright Sjon, has conjured this bloody saga out of the ancient Scandinavian narratives that supplied Shakespeare’s source material. His raw material, you might say, since “The Northman” insists on the primal, brutal, atavistic dimensions of the tale. Amleth, as he is called, is no student philosopher, temporizing over the nuances of being and nonbeing. He is a berserker, a howling warrior with ripped abs, superhero combat skills and a righteous cause for his endless blood lust.

This is what I mean by the same old story. In modern movies, even more than in 17th-century English plays, revenge can seem like the most — maybe the only — credible motive for heroic action. Just ask the Batman . Truth and justice are divisive abstractions, too easily deconstructed or dressed up in gaudy ideological colors. Love is problematic. Payback, in contrast, is clean and inarguable, even if it leaves a mess in its wake.

“Avenge father. Save mother. Kill uncle,” young Amleth repeats to himself as he flees the scene of his father’s death. These words propel him into manhood, as he grows from a wide-eyed boy played by Oscar Novak into a cold-eyed marauder played by Alexander Skarsgard.

Amleth inhabits a world whose operating principle is cruelty, and Eggers’s accomplishment lies in his fastidious, fanatical rendering of that world, down to its bed linens and cooking utensils. If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons, you may have encountered a dungeon master who took the game very, very seriously, attacking the task of fantasy world-building with excessive scholarly rigor and over-the-top imaginative zeal. That kind of player can be intimidating, but also a lot more fun than the average weekend geek.

Eggers is like that. His two previous features — “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” — unfold in versions of the past that split the difference between authenticity and hallucination. “The Witch” (2016) turns Puritan New England into a feverish, poisoned pastoral landscape of religious mania, unacknowledged lust and literal bedevilment. “The Lighthouse” (2019), set on a windswept island off the North Atlantic coast of America, is a clammy sea chantey about men going mad in close quarters.

Driven less by plot than by a succession of intensifying moods, these films dig into historical moments when the boundary between the human and the supernatural felt especially thin. Archaic forms of belief are treated not as quaint superstitions, but as ways of understanding scary or inexplicable facets of experience. The witches and mermaids are as real as anything else.

And so it is in “The Northman,” which, like “The Witch,” mines a shadow-shrouded pagan past for images and effects. In the 1600s of the earlier film, older customs and beliefs had been pushed into the margins by Christianity, but in this version of early medieval Northern Europe, that relationship is reversed. Christianity is mentioned in passing as a weird form of worship — “their God is a corpse nailed to a tree,” one character says — in a polytheistic, polyglot society made and unmade by endless conquest, migration and war.

As a boy, Amleth lives in a benevolent corner of this world. His father, Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke), is a pretty fun dad for a warrior chieftain, turning Amleth’s initiation ceremony into a night of silly, flatulent horseplay. Spiritual guidance is provided by a shamanistic fool (Willem Dafoe) and a spooky seeress (Björk). But nothing can protect Aurvandil from his bastard half brother, Fjolnir (Claes Bang), who kills the king and takes up with his wife, Gudrun (Nicole Kidman).

Later, Amleth’s child’s-eye view of what happened will be complicated when he hears Gudrun’s side of things. (Kidman’s sly performance is the most Shakespearean thing about “The Northman.”) First, though, he will join a band of Viking raiders, whose plunder of a town somewhere around Russia provides Amleth — and Eggers — a chance to show off their chops. Literally, in Amleth’s case, as he hacks, stabs and cudgels his way over ramparts and through muddy dooryards and alleyways.

Eggers, aided by Jarin Blaschke’s smooth, immersive cinematography, turns the scene into a Hieronymus Bosch painting in motion, a tableau of terror and chaos composed with remorseless clarity. There is something coldblooded in this matter-of-fact depiction of violence. Villagers are herded into a barn, which is sealed up and set ablaze. Rapes, beatings and disembowelments happen in the background or on the edges of the frame, barely noticed by our hero.

The purpose of the attack is to capture slaves who will be sorted and shipped off to various customers — including, Amleth learns, to Fjolnir, who has set up a new kingdom in Iceland with Gudrun and their sons. In the company of a captive named Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy, who also did some forestry in “The Witch”), Amleth joins the enslaved, smuggling himself across the sea to confront his nemesis at last.

We can leave the plot there. It moves in a straight, relentless line, but matters in the Fjolnir-Gudrun household get a little intricate once Amleth and Olga arrive on this scene. Her earth-goddess magical powers make her a formidable ally, though she isn’t only that. The hokeyness of the romance between Skarsgard and Taylor-Joy, from an old-school movie-lover’s point of view, is one of the best parts of “The Northman” — a touch of ultra-blond Hollywood glamour amid the Nordic mumbo-jumbo.

Which I totally respect. A recent profile in The New Yorker posited that “The Northman,” which lists several historical consultants in its credits, “might be the most accurate Viking movie ever made.” The evidence for this is in the production design (by Craig Lathrop) and the costumes (by Linda Muir), in the runic chapter titles and in the careful pronunciation of words like “Odin” and “Valhalla.” But fidelity to the past, however obsessive, is ultimately a minor, technical achievement, and “The Northman” is a movie with big — if somewhat obscure — ambitions.

Eggers’s brutal, beautiful vision of history compensates, as such visions often do, for the deficiencies of the present. It isn’t that anyone would be happier living Amleth’s life, or those of the nameless slaves and soldiers whose slaughter decorates his adventure. But his reality is built on clear and emphatic moral lines, on coherent (albeit harsh) ideas about honor, power and what gives meaning to life and death.

The point is not that you or any other modern person believes in these ideas — though I suppose there are some people who might pretend to — but that the characters are governed by them. Their fates make sense to them, and therefore to us as well. What’s perhaps most impressive about “The Northman” is that it hurtles through 136 minutes of musclebound, shaggy-maned mayhem without a whisper of camp or a wink of irony. Nobody is doing this for fun. Even if, in the end — thank goodness — that’s mostly what it amounts to.

The Northman Rated R. Endless blood lust, and some of the other kind, too. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Review: Robert Eggers’ mighty Viking epic ‘The Northman’ puts the art before the Norse

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Not long into Robert Eggers’ “The Northman,” a mad and mesmerizing song of Iceland and fire, the camera plunges down into darkness, as if it had suddenly been swallowed up by the Earth. It’s AD 895, on a frigid North Atlantic island, and we’re following a scrawny young Viking prince, Amleth (Oscar Novak), and his scraggly bearded father, King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), as they descend into a firelit temple, where the royal stripling is led through a muddy, bloody rite of manhood. Amid much growling, howling, floating and farting, Aurvandil predicts his own impending demise and makes Amleth vow to avenge him — an oath sealed in blood and destined to be fulfilled with great geysers of gore and lava.

There are many such grim prophecies and elemental eruptions in “The Northman,” starting with the movie’s arresting opening shot of a volcano belching smoke, fire and voice-over. (I didn’t catch every word, but the volcano might as well be saying, “Behold. Cinema.”) Aurvandil’s fatalistic vision will soon be proved correct: After returning home from distant battlefields, the king is brutally slain by his brother, Fjölnir (Claes Bang, “The Square” ). Amleth, having witnessed his uncle’s betrayal, barely escapes alive but vows to return and avenge his father, as promised, and save his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), whom Fjölnir has taken as his wife. And return he will decades later, now played by a strapping, towering Alexander Skarsgård in full-blown Old Norse berserker mode, who tears into this role like a man — and an actor — seizing hold of his destiny.

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If you sense some mimicry in this madness, well spotted: The legend of Prince Amleth was the direct inspiration for “Hamlet,” though Skarsgård’s mighty warrior also hails from a cinematic pantheon of vengeance seekers broad enough to include Conan the Barbarian , Maximus and Inigo Montoya . If that makes “The Northman” sound derivative, it is: a witchy brew of Old Norse mythology, Hollywood pageantry and proto-Shakespearean revenge epic.

But Skarsgård (also one of the movie’s producers) has found an ideal collaborator in Eggers, a director sufficiently steeped in film history to know the difference between inspiration and imitation. Like his memorable period freakouts “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse,” though on a vastly more ambitious scale, “The Northman” is both a dazzling display of film craft and a sly retooling of genre, a movie that delights in fulfilling certain conventions while turning others on their artfully severed heads.

Robert Eggers knew he’d have to fight for his vision of ‘The Northman.’ The result was worth it

Robert Eggers makes his most ambitious film yet with Viking saga ‘The Northman,’ combining historical accuracy with a fantasy mysticism.

April 22, 2022

And so while it’s clear enough how Amleth’s story will end, the long arc of his journey takes unpredictable, even unsettling turns. When we first meet Skarsgård’s fully grown Amleth, he’s joined a band of murderous marauders, clad in wolf skins as they bring a Slavic village to its knees. Eggers, shooting nearly every scene in fluid, intricately choreographed long takes, gives the action the deliberation and intensity of an ancient ritual. (The sweepingly immersive cinematography is by Jarin Blaschke, the spare, purposeful editing by Louise Ford.) This violence is the way of the world, the movie suggests, and the atrocities we’re witnessing — a burning hut evokes the wartime conflagrations of Elem Klimov’s “Come and See” — are as unexceptional as they are unbearable.

Amleth, courting and thwarting our sympathies at will, is a very strong link in an endless chain of death. (He’s not alone, to judge by an end-credits crawl loaded with names like “Hrólfur Split-Lip” and “Thórfinnr Tooth-Gnasher.”) As Amleth goes on his latest feral rampage, you can’t help but wonder about how many children he’s orphaning and how many spinoff revenge dramas he’s setting in motion.

And Skarsgård, a charmer with an undercurrent of aloofness, is perfectly cast as a warrior so numb to carnage that it takes a supernatural intervention to remind him of his sworn mission: Fjölnir, Amleth learns, has been dethroned and fled with Gudrún and his sons to Iceland. It’s only fitting that this news is delivered by a witchy seeress played by Iceland’s biggest star, Björk, resplendent in oracular blue lighting and a Cher-worthy seashell-ringed headdress.

Björk is one of two prominent Icelandic talents pressed into service here. The other is poet and novelist Sjón, who co-wrote the screenplay with Eggers (and who supplied lyrics for Björk’s last major movie, 2000’s “Dancer in the Dark” ). Their involvement speaks to Eggers’ characteristic insistence on verisimilitude, born of an obsessive, research-driven approach to filmmaking that might seem persnickety if it weren’t so passionate. A production and costume designer before he turned to directing, Eggers has become our great builder of worlds in extremis: After the spooky Puritan New England of “The Witch” and the lonely maritime outpost of “The Lighthouse,” he once again conjures a nightmarish vision of humanity on the precipice.

But despite the fastidiousness of “The Northman’s” animal-pelts-and-chain-mail aesthetic, the filmmaking feels freer, looser and nuttier this time around — and not just because the spotty visual record of ancient Viking culture leaves plenty to an artist’s imagination. (The director’s splendid regular collaborators include production designer Craig Lathrop and costume designer Linda Muir.) Happily, Eggers makes movies, not research papers, and his sweet spot is that zone where his art-film idiosyncrasies merge with a genuine flair for Hollywood showmanship. Witness the self-consciously florid dialogue, sometimes poetically heightened to the point of torture. Witness too the inspired scenery chewing and quasi-Scandinavian accents indulged by Hawke (gone too soon) and especially Kidman, whose performance as the seemingly demure Gudrún turns out to be one of the movie’s most deliciously barbed surprises.

You may recall that Skarsgård and Kidman play a troubled couple in the HBO miniseries “Big Little Lies,” an association that gives Amleth and Gudrún’s eventual scenes together that much more of a feverish Oedipal charge. But Eggers is in no mood to hasten the family reunions and revelations, or to blow his protagonist’s cover. Amleth arrives on Fjölnir’s farm a slave, having stowed away in a boat full of war prisoners, and he’s wily enough to pass himself off for a while as a hard worker and seemingly loyal family servant. He and an enslaved ally, Olga (a fine Anya Taylor-Joy, reteaming with Eggers after “The Witch”), bide their time and share their bodies and secrets, laying the groundwork for a campaign of deadly sabotage against Fjölnir’s household.

Those schemes, when they come to pass, are initially attributed to the work of evil spirits. And while Amleth will eventually take his rightful credit as the author of Fjölnir’s pain, the spirit world — the raw material of the Icelandic myths that are this story’s lifeblood — is of supreme importance here. Eggers, plunging headlong into his material, draws no distinction between fantasy and reality, though as a storyteller, he is naturally inclined toward an ardent defense of paganism in all its forms. Just as “The Witch” critiqued 17th-century Puritan repression with a gleeful embrace of nude bonfire-dancing devilry, so “The Northman,” with its ominous ravens, bearded he-witches and helmeted Valkyries, treats Viking mythology as its own living, breathing, dazzling reality.

You may find yourself longing for more of that fantasy, perhaps as a distraction from the inexorable death march that Amleth’s journey is destined to become. Eggers, who likes to conjure elaborate visions only to attack their foundations from within, works hard to inflect that journey with a self-critical spirit. There’s a productive tension at the heart of “The Northman,” a tug-of-war between the Hollywood revenge-epic tradition from which it superficially hails and the sharper, more subversive dismantling of simplistic payback fantasies it wants to be.

The final passages are laced with surprises you may or may not see coming, bitter reversals of perspective that complicate — but don’t entirely mitigate — the pleasures of watching a wronged man settle an old score. Bang makes Fjölnir an implacable brute, but not an unsympathetic one. The same is true of Skarsgård, whose career-igniting role on “True Blood,” a vampire with Viking roots and the name of Eric Northman, feels like both a sequel and a warm-up act to this one. Amleth may be no unblemished hero, but with a bulging, blood-caked torso and a willingness to storm the gates of hell, he can still lead you on a trek straight to cinematic Valhalla.

‘The Northman’

Rating: R, for strong bloody violence, some sexual content and nudity Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes Playing: Starts April 22 in general release

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The Northman First Reviews: Bold, Unflinching, Visually Breathtaking

Critics say robert eggers' viking revenge tale boasts his trademark mysticism and sense of atmosphere, but it's a brutal, invigorating spectacle that's his most accessible film yet..

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Robert Eggers , the bold visionary behind The Witch and The Lighthouse , is back with another ambitiously accurate period piece in The Northman . Starring Alexander Skarsgård as a Hamlet-esque Viking and Nicole Kidman as his mother, it is said to be the filmmaker’s most accessible yet, in part because it’s an historical action movie with a relatively sizable budget. The first reviews of The Northman are mostly very positive, with critics highlighting the performances and the craftsmanship, which come together in a spectacular blockbuster unlike any we’ve gotten in a long time.

Here’s what critics are saying about The Northman :

Is this one of the most unique films of the year?

It’s been a minute since we had something like it. It’s bold, gritty, and just downright awesome. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

While it’s a story you’ve seen before, you’ve never seen it like this. – Germain Lussier, io9.com

It is invigorating to see a studio-backed piece that is allowed to be uncompromisingly grim and savage. – Michelle Kisner, The Movie Sleuth

Among the best films I’ve seen in the last few years. It’s a stone-cold masterpiece. – Chris Bumbray, JoBlo’s Movie Network

The Northman feels unusually thin, with less meat on its bones than 2007’s schlocky Pathfinder or your basic Conan movie. – Peter Debruge, Variety

How does it compare to Robert Eggers’ other films?

A considerable step up in scope. – Jordan Raup, The Film Stage

With The Northman , he delivers what might be his most grounded and straightforward story thus far. – Patrick Cavanaugh, ComicBook.com

It makes the freaky artisanal horror that put director Robert Eggers on the map — The Witch and The Lighthouse — look like Disney movies. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

It’s less resonant than Eggers’ debut film, The Witch . – Katie Rife, Polygon

If there’s one thing The Northman is missing from the rest of Eggers’ oeuvre, it is that lack of madness that made parts of The Witch and The Lighthouse almost feel like a catharsis. – Ross Bonaime, Collider

It lacks the element of surprise that made The Witch and The Lighthouse feel like instant classics. – Peter Debruge, Variety

(Photo by Aidan Monaghan/©Focus Features)

Will mainstream audiences enjoy it?

They will. Because this is the kind of filmmaking that rips you out of your body so hard that you’re liable to forget what year it is. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

It’s his most accessible, and certainly the most exciting… The Northman isn’t a movie for everybody, but it’s the Robert Eggers movie that’s probably for the widest audience. – Germain Lussier, io9.com

Eggers’ most accessible film yet… though the bone-crunching gore and dashes of cosmic mystery prevent The Northman from being anything close to “mainstream.” – Hoai-Tran Bui, Slashfilm

The Northman is destined to be a bit of a cult favorite, but it may also have a chance at more. – Joey Magidson, Awards Radar

Eggers, who let his freak flag fly with A24, has reverted to a more conventional mode for this relatively mainstream Focus Features release, eschewing the elevated language of The Lighthouse . – Peter Debruge, Variety

Will it appeal to fans of history and historical epics?

Meticulously researched, it makes other Viking shows and movies look cartoonish by comparison. – Chris Bumbray, JoBlo’s Movie Network

The sets and costumes crafted by Eggers regulars Craig Lathrop and Linda Muir put any of the film’s contemporaries to shame (yes, even Gladiator … especially Gladiator ). – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

In terms of making history exciting and engrossing, The Northman is about as titillating as gateway drugs get. – Katie Rife, Polygon

What other comparisons does The Northman invite?

It’s as if The Green Knight got passed through a “bro” filter. – Hoai-Tran Bui, Slashfilm

It’s an audaciously bonkers movie that keeps threatening to careen off into some kind of weird no man’s land where Game of Thrones meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail . – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Feels more like a heavy-metal music video, a testosterone-fueled melange of fire, blood, nudity, and screaming, fueled by hatred and hallucinatory shamanic rituals. – Katie Rife, Polygon

This [Shakespearean] drama very much takes Amleth away from the thespian green room and simplifies the story along Lion King lines (no Hakuna Matata though). – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

The movie that The Northman most resembles is The Revenant , an impressively orchestrated marathon of misery that prioritized directorial skill over audience engagement. – Peter Debruge, Variety

How is Alexander Skarsgård in the lead?

Skarsgård has never been better or more suited to a role. – Hoai-Tran Bui, Slashfilm

Prince Amleth is the hunky, heroically vengeful killing machine with a heart that Skarsgård was born to play. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth should become his definitive role. It’s one of those unforgettable performances that seems bound to be iconic. – Chris Bumbray, JoBlo’s Movie Network

A superb Skarsgård balances the bodily vigorousness required with the shattered innocence that defines his part. – Carlos Aguilar, The Playlist

Muscles only go so far to compensate for the strange emptiness behind young Skarsgård’s eyes. – Peter Debruge, Variety

Will it particularly delight True Blood fans?

Longtime fans will get a kick out of him tapping into the cultural roots of his ancient True Blood vampire, Eric Northman, too. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

It’s truly a full-circle moment. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

How is Nicole Kidman?

It’s a role that truly highlights the range that Kidman is capable of. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

Kidman delivers some of her best work. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

It’s Nicole Kidman as Queen Gudrún who really steals the show. She has some incredibly intense, emotionally complex moments, and you believe every second. – Germain Lussier, io9.com

She delivers a performance so feral it seems to shake the very foundations of the frame she inhabits. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

Kidman is a hoot, juggling fire and ice in an enjoyably over-the-top turn. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

How is the action?

The fight sequences are incredible. Meticulously choreographed and shot with purpose. The battles are bloody and intense. It’s not overly stylized. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

The choreography of the combat scenes — both the staging and the shooting, in long, unbroken takes — is mind-blowing. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Like a grim, grounded war movie, in which the battle scenes play out in a slow, weighty, almost plodding manner, meticulously choreographed to be as brutish and realistic as possible. – Hoai-Tran Bui, Slashfilm

The inevitable final showdown [is] one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen on film. It’s as if George Lucas filmed the finale of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith for real. – Germain Lussier, io9.com

There’s a brilliant set piece where Eggers shoots a Berserker siege in a single, unbroken take that will be discussed for years to come. – Chris Bumbray, JoBlo’s Movie Network

The Northman is never dull. The sheer muscularity of Eggers’ direction denies it that chance… also, someone gets decapitated like every 10 minutes. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

How does the movie look?

Visually, The Northman is breathtaking combining beautiful vistas with fantastical imagery. – Michelle Kisner, The Movie Sleuth

Visually, The Northman is stunning, with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke boosting the film’s color palette with variations on light, shadow, and striking gray tones. – Mae Abdulbaki, Screen Rant

Blaschke’s cinematography is also noteworthy for its approach to instances of grace, coating them in either dazzling moonlight or the fantastical color palette of the northern lights. – Carlos Aguilar, The Playlist

Your jaw is so often left gaping in awe from its stunning cinematography and in terror from its ferocity to the point you might just resign yourself to keeping it open for the duration of the film. – Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

The Northman’ s landscape imagery feels like a step down for a filmmaker who once seemed intent on imbuing his settings with an unnerving sense of character. – Mark Hanson, Slant Magazine

Are there any major problems?

Fissures do present themselves — not least of all a recurring CG-heavy vision of a family tree that plays like unnecessary connect-the-dots material to appease a wider audience. – Jordan Raup, The Film Stage

It’s somewhat disappointing that The Northman reveals itself to be so programmatic… Eggers’s film is sometimes frustratingly shackled to the obligations of plot. – Mark Hanson, Slant Magazine

The Northman lacks a sense of nuance in its characters and in its story… It barely scratches the surface of its story, leaving the audience with crumbs rather than a full feast. – Mae Abdulbaki, Screen Rant

Every character has a chance to shine individually. However, sometimes the relationships between them are a tad underbaked. – Jeff Nelson, Showbiz Cheat Sheet

The Scandinavian accents coming out of the mouths of actors like Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy and Ethan Hawke risk bringing on a House of Gucci trauma relapse. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

The pacing has a rocky start. – Catalina Combs, Black Girl Nerds

Is this the kind of alternative blockbuster we need right now?

What Eggers has ambitiously crafted lands as an invigorating beacon for an industry in need of studio fare with substantial ideas and artistry. – Carlos Aguilar, The Playlist

The film makes you appreciate how seldom we get to see a big, noisy, brawling spectacle these days that’s grounded not in comic-book superheroes and villains but in culturally specific history. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

The simple fact that financiers had the chutzpah to bankroll such a big swing in the face of our blockbuster-or-bust theatrical climate would have felt like a (pyrrhic) victory against the forces of corporate homogenization, no matter who was behind the camera. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

In a wide release landscape of easy-to-please, vaporous entertainment, such feats should be celebrated. – Jordan Raup, The Film Stage

It’s a big risk to spend that much cash on an auteur-driven historical epic at a time when historical epics have largely fallen by the wayside. But what a beautiful risk it is. I call upon Odin: may The Northman make a billion dollars. – Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

The Northman opens in theaters on April 22, 2022.

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The Northman Reviews

Neither tragedy nor Eggers skimp on violence, screams, sweat, blood and swords, along with ambitious mise en scène, some of the best photography and one of the most epic soundtracks of the year. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Dec 19, 2023

Filled with stunning cinematography, the film is an intense, immersive, sometimes surreal, descent into an otherworldly milieu of folkloric horror and medieval barbarism.

Full Review | Oct 31, 2023

As a bloody and most certainly trippy revenge tale, The Northman is astounding in many places. Eggers may not have created the ultimate Viking tale, but he has crafted an astonishing spectacle that combines his established style with something larger.

Full Review | Sep 17, 2023

Eggers’ visual style is a roller coaster of primordial, oneiric imagery of an epic, wild landscape, turbulent supernatural forces and untamed nature sans any whiff of domestication.

Full Review | Aug 16, 2023

Robert Eggers has crafted one for the ages… The Northman is a cinematic epic that blew my mind from start to finish. Lavishing cinematography that brings to life this era, visceral violence that adds to the world, & a jaw dropping third act

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

The Northman is an incredibly gifted film full of hostility, genealogy, strength, and desire.

Violent and powerful from start to finish, The Northman tells an epic, period accurate Viking tale that easily immerses its audience throughout the entire run-time.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 25, 2023

The Northman is a story that’s been told many times over, and save for showcasing the stunning scenery of Ireland, this adaptation is nothing to write home about.

The Northman isn’t trying to elevate horror nor dismantle fetishistic fantasies. It’s a fully-formed exercise in realigning blockbuster pictures back to the way they should be: big, visually breathtaking, and bolstered by a unique vision.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 21, 2023

By the time the end credits hit, you will be waiting for it to begin anew, and that is one of the highest compliments you could give a movie of this size and breadth.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 21, 2023

It provides all the weirdness, gore, beauty and singularity that you would expect from this director’s take on a Viking tale of vengeance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 9, 2023

The Northman’s carefully choreographed, single-shot takes and startlingly lit close-ups blow the spatially disorienting and over-edited style of so many contemporary action films completely out of the fjord.

Full Review | May 9, 2023

The Northman is practically bursting with testosterone. The story of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), a Viking Prince hellbent on revenge, Robert Eggers‘s third film is essentially a case study in the destructive nature of unyielding masculinity.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Feb 18, 2023

Northman is one of Robert Egger best films. The scope, the scale, the atmospheric building of Norse mythology is groundbreaking. Along with some insanely well acted performances and beyond thrilling action and revenge based story. Must Watch Masterpiece!

Full Review | Original Score: 9.5/10 | Dec 26, 2022

The Northman creates a unique saga that taps into something truly primal before one hell of an ending.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Dec 4, 2022

An intoxicating and epic blend of violence, mysticism, and breathtaking visuals.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 11, 2022

Spectacle, pageantry and myth combine with blood, mud and abs for a dazzling, uproarious Viking spree in which Alexander Skarsgård seeks to avenge the murder of his father with the aid of Anya Taylor-Joy and Icelandic national treasure Björk.

Full Review | Oct 3, 2022

The Northman stands as a stark reminder that there is still a place in cinema for gorgeous, inspired odysseys, rife with literary allusions, deep-seated spiritual meanings, and an exploration of complex human emotions.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Sep 24, 2022

This brutally violent, yet soaringly lyrical action epic is quite unlike anything captured on screen before.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2022

The Northman is an epic the likes of which we hardly see in Hollywood anymore, carefully curated by a master of the medium and packed with powerhouse performances.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 1, 2022

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Alexander skarsgard and nicole kidman in robert eggers’ ‘the northman’: film review.

Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy and Ethan Hawke also star in this big, bloody medieval Viking saga of fate, family and revenge.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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It’s been a while since we’ve had an all-out blood-and-guts battle orgy in which warriors outfitted in sackcloth and animal skins hurl themselves into the fray, wielding swords and blazing torches, shields, hatchets and daggers, while bellowing dialogue that mostly begins and ends with “RAAARRRGGGHHH!” There’s a lot of that in The Northman , a brawny fever dream which makes the freaky artisanal horror that put director Robert Eggers on the map — The Witch and The Lighthouse — look like Disney movies. To use a term from a ritualistic fireside chant where Alexander Skarsgård’s Amleth blurs the line between man and beast, this is the untamed “berserker” of Norse legends.

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Navigating the leap from his modestly budgeted previous instant-cult films to this large-scale $90 million bloodbath for Focus Features , Eggers is nothing if not fearless. Benefitting again from the exactingly detailed work of production designer Craig Lathrop and costumer Linda Muir, the director conjures an immersive, pungently evocative atmosphere that catapults us back to the turn of the 10th century, a dark and viscerally violent past in which human savagery and the supernatural co-exist.

The Northman

Release date : Friday, April 22 Cast : Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Björk Director : Robert Eggers Screenwriters : Sjón, Robert Eggers

The inadvertently campy dialogue in the script Eggers co-wrote with Icelandic novelist and poet Sjón ( Lamb ) quite often prompts giggles, and the Scandinavian accents coming out of the mouths of actors like Nicole Kidman , Anya Taylor-Joy and Ethan Hawke risk bringing on a House of Gucci trauma relapse. It’s an audaciously bonkers movie that keeps threatening to careen off into some kind of weird no man’s land where Game of Thrones meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail . And that’s even before Björk drops by as a witchy seeress, outfitted in wicker work, seashells and beads.

But The Northman ’s marauding energy holds you hostage and Prince Amleth is the hunky, heroically vengeful killing machine with a heart that Skarsgård was born to play. Longtime fans will get a kick out of him tapping into the cultural roots of his ancient True Blood vampire, Eric Northman, too.

The screenplay draws from both Norse myths and Icelandic family sagas, building on the Scandinavian legend of Amleth that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet . The prologue takes place in the fictitious North Atlantic island kingdom of Hrafnsey, where King Aurvandil (Hawke), aka War-Raven, arrives home to much fanfare. The gash in his guts inflicted by a foe in battle prompts him to prepare the 10-year-old Amleth (Oscar Novak) to take over the throne, despite the objections of Queen Gudrún (Kidman) that their son is just a boy. Amleth’s transcendental initiation involves crawling around on all fours underground with his father, howling like wolves. Also, belching, farting, levitating and accessing disturbing visions via Aurvandil’s wound.

No sooner has Amleth sworn to avenge his father should he die by an enemy’s sword than the boy witnesses his murder at the hands of his uncle Fjölnir ( Claes Bang ), whose friskiness with the Queen has already been joked about by the shamanistic court fool, Heimir (Willem Dafoe).

“Bring me the boy’s head,” Fjölnir commands his men, accompanied by the shrieking strings and pounding drums of Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough’s hard-driving score. But Amleth, after watching the slaughter of male villagers, abduction of the women and the Queen slung over Fjölnir’s shoulder and hauled off screaming, escapes by boat. He vows to rescue his mother, kill his uncle and avenge his father.

A couple decades later, Amleth has transformed into a muscle-bound man harnessing the spirit of both a wolf and a bear. He’s rage personified, traveling the Land of the Rus with a pack of Viking raiders that seemingly never met a Slavic settlement they couldn’t plunder. But Björk’s earth-mother seeress recognizes him as the lost prince and reminds him of his fate. Learning that Fjölnir was driven from the kingdom he usurped and fled to a remote agrarian community in Iceland, Amleth boards a slave ship headed there to supply labor.

Anya Taylor-Joy plays a fellow passenger who knows a good hook-up when she sees one. “I am Olga of the Birch Forest,” she says by way of introduction, adding that while he has the strength to break men’s bones, she has the cunning to break their minds. Both get taken on at Fjölnir’s farm, where Olga gradually gains Amleth’s trust and he reveals his plan to murder his uncle and save his mother, whom he believes is only feigning love for her abductor for the sake of their young son (Elliott Rose).

Eggers’ films have shared a fascination with the magical properties of animals — a goat in The Witch (love you, Black Phillip), a cursed seagull in The Lighthouse . The occult fauna this time is wolf cubs and ravens, the former leading Amleth to find a massive sword of the undead, known as The Night Blade; the latter getting busy with their beaks when he’s tortured and bound late in the game.

The storytelling accelerates as Amleth gets closer to his goal, wreaking carnage among his uncle’s men and sparking fear of a “distempered spirit” in their midst. The plotting becomes more frenetic though remains lucid, even if there are one or two arch moments that had me almost howling like a wolf.

Gudrún’s reunion with the son she long believed to be dead should have been a moment of high drama. But it’s hard not to laugh when Kidman, wearing Daryl Hannah’s old crimped hair from Splash and sporting a Natasha Fatale accent, greets a mighty silver blade at her throat with, “Your sword is long,” before engaging in some incestuous flirtation. When Fjölnir suffers a grievous loss and screams, “What evil is this?!” Gudrún shoots him a wide-eyed death stare and snaps, “Behave!” like she’s a Nordic Austin Powers.

The romance between Amleth and Olga also has time to blossom during all this, complete with a post-coital respite in the woods right out of John Boorman’s Excalibur . There’s also an interlude on a flying horse ridden by a fiery-eyed Valkyrie (Ineta Sliuzaite). But even as Amleth ensures the continuation of his bloodline, his deathly appointment with uncle Fjölnir at “the gates of hell” remains.

That would be the mouth of an active volcano, where they fight nude, as any self-respecting medieval warrior would, though their digitally erased penises make them look distractingly like Ken dolls. I could be wrong, but their smooth groins in the lava light look more like the result of studio interference than prudishness on the part of the actors or of a director so intent on presenting a world suspended between life and legend in all its gritty glory.

The film is shot by Eggers’ regular DP Jarin Blaschke, with restless propulsion and with a textured feel for the dramatic landscapes, lashed by rain, wind, snow and ice, or coated with mud and ash. The choreography of the combat scenes — both the staging and the shooting, in long, unbroken takes — is mind-blowing. Also fully enveloping is the dense sound design, with Viking Age instruments like the birch horn and bone flute heard alongside the thundering elements and the chaos of fighting.

The Northman is certainly a lot of movie, and while its hysterical intensity at times veers into overwrought silliness, it’s both unstinting and exhilarating in its depiction of a culture ruled by the cycles of violence. The cohesion of Eggers’ vision commands admiration, as does the commitment of his collaborators, both in front of and behind the camera.

Skarsgård, who has been working for more than a decade to develop a film project rooted in his childhood love of Viking myth and lore, has never been fiercer or more physically imposing. Taylor-Joy, who got her start in The Witch , is beguiling as Olga weaves baskets and plots havoc. (Her parents from that earlier film, Kate Dickie and Ralph Ineson, also make appearances.) Kidman is a hoot, juggling fire and ice in an enjoyably over-the-top turn. And if someone doesn’t cast Bang as a Bond nemesis or some other suitably elevated evildoer soon, then Hollywood just isn’t paying attention.

Whether you buy into Eggers’ insane epic, get high on its blood-drenched sorcery or roll your eyes at its excesses, the film makes you appreciate how seldom we get to see a big, noisy, brawling spectacle these days that’s grounded not in comic-book superheroes and villains but in culturally specific history. In other words, a work of bold imagination, not another offshoot of a familiar IP. That alone deserves respect.

Full credits

Distribution: Focus Features Production companies: New Regency, Square Peg Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Björk, Gustav Lindh, Elliott Rose, Oscar Novak, Kate Dickie, Ralph Ineson, Phill Martin, Eldar Skar, Olwen Fouéré, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Ineta Sliuzaite Director: Robert Eggers Screenwriters: Sjón, Robert Eggers Producers: Lars Knudsen, Mark Huffam, Robert Eggers, Alexander Skarsgård, Arnon Milchan Executive producers: Yariv Milchan, Michael Schaeffer, Sam Hanson, Thomas Benski Director of photography: Jarin Blaschke Production designer: Craig Lathrop Costume designer: Linda Muir Music: Robin Carolan, Sebastian Gainsborough Editor: Louise Ford

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‘The Northman’ Review: Alexander Skarsgård Hacks His Way Through Bloody Viking Epic

'The Witch' director Robert Eggers has vision to burn, but robs this brutal 10th-century revenge story of the tragic twist it needs to hook us emotionally.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Fields glow kryptonite green against volcanic black soil, while not-so-distant mountains smoke and spew hot red lava above the heads of hardy sheep. Nowhere else on Earth looks like Iceland, which is why so many productions over the past decade — from “Interstellar” and “Oblivion” to “Game of Thrones” and “Thor” — have used its peerless primordial terrain to represent alternate dimensions and far-off planets.

Iceland plays itself in Robert Eggers ’ “ The Northman ,” a brutal tale of 10th-century Viking revenge that makes evocative use of far more than just the scenery to be found in this stunning Nordic outpost. Teaming with local novelist Sjón, Eggers — a visionary director with a preternatural interest in history, as evidenced by his rigorously detail-oriented horror movies “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” — also draws from the region’s rich folklore, looking to the sagas of Iceland, as well as the same Scandinavian legend that inspired Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” to mount the classiest Vikesploitation epic you can imagine, complete with a doomsday Björk cameo. That it’s ultimately rather dull and hardly any fun is almost beside the point.

Blame that largely on Alexander Skarsgård, son of towering European talent Stellan (“Breaking the Waves”). Alexander’s as handsome a star as Sweden has produced, but sorely lacks the charisma to carry a movie of this scale — rumored to have cost $90 million. Though he’s bulked up significantly since his comparably physical turn in 2016’s largely unnecessary “The Legend of Tarzan,” muscles only go so far to compensate for the strange emptiness behind young Skarsgård’s eyes. And so, this scion of art-house royalty has much to prove in a starring role that borrows heavily from “Gladiator” and pretty much every Mel Gibson movie (but mostly “Braveheart”).

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The story is simple — too simple, alas: Puny prince Amleth (played as a boy by Oscar Novak) eagerly welcomes his father, Viking king Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), back from battle, undergoing an initiation ceremony that will set him on course to rule the tribe one day. “You are dogs who wish to become men,” growls the fool (Willem Dafoe), though Amleth’s animal instincts will not reveal themselves until much later. Upon exiting the trippy ritual, father and son are confronted by half-brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang), who relieves the king of his crown, and the head to which it is attached, then orders the same fate for his son, who escapes, repeating the words, “I will avenge you, Father. I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir.”

This mantra is practically all the plot “The Northman” offers, skipping forward across the years that many would find most compelling — when this tender child acquires the skills of strength and mind that make him capable of facing off against his uncle, who has taken Amleth’s mother, Gudrún (Nicole Kidman, blazing with unrivaled fury), as his queen. In most respects, Eggers is a unique artist with strong, singular ideas of how to script, stage and pace his films, and while “The Northman” is nothing if not a signature addition to a most original oeuvre — no one but Eggers would or could have reimagined “Hamlet” thus — it lacks the element of surprise that made “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” feel like instant classics.

Over the course of a portentous 137 minutes, Amleth will dutifully avenge his father, “save” his mother and face off against Fjölnir, but none of it makes even a fraction of the emotional impact we’d expect from even the crassest sword-and-sandal movie. Eggers’ films tend to play on a different, more self-conscious level, where audiences’ pleasure comes as much from atmosphere and all-around weirdness as it does from deranged narratives that, in retrospect, are destined to have played out exactly as they did. If anything, the oddity factor should be greater here than ever, given Eggers’ fetishistic commitment to weaving elements of Norse mythology alongside the punishing Icelandic action. To that end, visions of screaming Valkyries (model Ineta Sliuzaite) and a haggard He-Witch (Ingvar Sigurðsson) pack a hallucinatory punch amid the otherworldly locales.

Still, “The Northman” feels unusually thin, with less meat on its bones than 2007’s schlocky “Pathfinder” or your basic “Conan” movie. Eggers, who formerly let his freak flag fly with A24, has reverted to a more conventional mode for this relatively mainstream Focus Features release, eschewing the elevated language of “The Lighthouse” and avoiding the kind of surrealism seen in David Lowery’s “The Green Knight” last year — a film that should have paved the way for far greater expressionism here. The movie that “The Northman” most resembles is “The Revenant,” an impressively orchestrated marathon of misery that prioritized directorial skill over audience engagement. Eggers’ feat seems similarly monomaniacal in its mission, often at the expense of the human dimension.

After raiding a Slavic village in a spectacular early scene, filmed in what appears to be a single uninterrupted take, Amleth hears the prediction that will snap him out of berserker mode and set him in motion to fulfill his destiny. His rather implausible plan involves branding his chest and sailing to Iceland with a boat full of Slavic slaves, including an almond-eyed beauty with platinum hair named Olga ( Anya Taylor-Joy ).

Olga proves to be both an asset and a distraction to Amleth upon reaching Iceland, suggesting a path his life could take if he were to set aside his fixation on revenge in favor of romance, Óðinn willing. This alternative is made explicit in a scene that seems all wrong for the movie, set aboard a Viking longship, as the actors stand crudely haloed against CG backdrops, suggesting either reshoots (this is only a guess, though it would explain what doesn’t work about the last act of the film) or a grave miscalculation as to what motivates the final, fiery showdown between Amleth and Fjölnir.

There’s a tried-and-true formula for revenge movies, which are tragic by their very nature, that depends on repeated demonstrations of evil by a figure who deserves to be destroyed. That model would require Fjölnir to do something unforgivable to Olga, since she’s the only thing in the world Amleth cares about. Failing that, he comes across as a cruel and merciless protagonist, bent on crushing the life of a man whom fate has already humbled. We still want to see him succeed, battling it out in the buff against the flaming Gates of Hel, but by this point, a film that has shown such painstaking attention to craft over character seems to be running more on testosterone than sensitivity.

Reviewed at Dolby Laboratories screening room, Burbank, Calif., April 5, 2022. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 137 MIN.

• Production: A Focus Features release of a Focus Features, Regency Enterprises presentation, in association with Perfect World Pictures of a New Regency, Square Peg production. Producers: Lars Knudsen, Mark Huffam, Robert Eggers, Alexander Skarsgård, Arnon Milchan. Co-producer: Francesca Cingolani. Executive producers: Yariv Milchan, Michael Schaefer, Sam Hanson, Thomas Benski.
• Crew: Director: Robert Eggers. Screenplay: Sjón, Robert Eggers. Camera: Jarin Blaschke. Editor: Louise Ford. Music: Robin Carolan, Sebastian Gainsborough.
• With: Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Björk, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie. (English, Old Norse dialogue)

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The Northman Review

15 Apr 2022

The Northman

No filmmaker in the last 20 years has done folklore quite like Robert Eggers . The Witch and The Lighthouse showcased his skilful ability to transpose the stories of old into celluloid form, without losing the historical, mystical and cultural veracity of their origin, and both have been weird and wacky gifts to behold. Yet these intimate portraits of North American myth are a whole different ballgame compared to the Viking legend of Eggers’ latest cinematic endeavour. To say he’s stepped it up a notch would be an understatement — the man’s smashed it right out of the park.

In an ambitious exploration of Nordic mythology, various gods are worshipped — anyone familiar with Marvel’s take on the Thor franchise will recognise names such as Odin or Freyja — but this is very much the brutal story of man. One man, in particular: Prince Amleth, a beast of a warrior played with feral intensity by Alexander Skarsgård . He stalks across the screen, shoulders hunched forward and carrying the weight of every kill he’s committed since fleeing his home as a cub after witnessing the murder of his father, King Aurvandil ( Ethan Hawke ), by his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang), in a power move to take over their kingdom in the North. If this tale feels similar to Hamlet , that’s because Eggers and his co-writer, Icelandic poet Sjón, took inspiration from the same 12th-century Danish story as Shakespeare. But the two have expertly interwoven mystical strands of Icelandic fable into five, multilayered chapters of bombastic drama, steeped in so much familial conflict, barbaric romance and bloodthirsty violence that after two-and-a-half hours, your mind, body and soul might just need an ice bath to recover.

Each vignette of action is articulated with such high-octane precision and depth by cinematographer Jarin Blaschke that no performance is wasted. In one sequence, the camera tracks Amleth roaring into action, sprinting at an encampment as spears and arrows whip past his naked body before he launches onto its high, wooden wall, hauls himself over and, with an axe, meets the heads, necks and backs of several opponents. Later, as he prowls through the village and turns out of shot, we witness the unrelentingly cruel violence visited upon defenceless women and children, before he returns to the frame in murderous fashion. Long takes like these, accompanied by composers Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough’s pulsating score, throbbing with drumbeats and low notes, emphasise the savage spectacle and unforgiving harshness of these times, but also the powerful physicality of Skarsgård.

Skarsgård seems possessed with Old Nordic fire, showing both melancholy and a taste for blood.

The Swedish actor has long wanted to play a Viking, and Eggers has created the perfect environment to truly bring out the berserker within. Whether it’s in the natural light against backdrops of forests, mountains, seas and rivers or behind the veil, on the rich, black-and-white plane of gods, dead kings and valkyries, Skarsgård seems possessed with Old Nordic fire, showing both melancholy and a taste for blood. It’s quite unlike anything he’s done before.

In such a wild historical epic, each actor, in fact, brings a willingness to throw themselves into the madness. Anya Taylor-Joy holds her own as white witch Olga of the Birch Forest, a character who is as radiant as she is resourceful, imbued with quiet confidence and emotional rigour. Hawke and Willem Dafoe — as Heimir the Fool — are riotously primeval in an early rite-of-passage scene; Björk’s seeress is pure magic; and Bang brings dignity and believable lethality to his chief antagonist. Nicole Kidman , meanwhile, is positively chaotic as Amleth’s queen mother, with a role that puts her son’s whole worldview into question. That’s the beauty of this story of heroes and villains, good and evil: it’s all about perspective, and Eggers’ vision of the Old World is one that closes in on the fallacies of men who are willing to kill and die for the sake of legacy, honour and tradition. He takes us on a bloody, merciless voyage across land, sea and otherworlds, culminating with a cathartic third-act battle realised in blazing glory. “Til Valhall!”, indeed.

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The northman, common sense media reviewers.

Powerful, incredibly bloody, vengeance-fueled Viking saga.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Although entire movie is a quest for revenge, the

Characters are mainly seeking violence and revenge

Driving force comes from White males (no notable n

Extremely strong, gory violence. Long, bloody batt

Woman's naked bottom. Several men and women appear

Infrequent use of "bastard," "bitch," "whore," "he

Characters eat a mushroom stew and go on "bad trip

Parents need to know that The Northman is a bloody Viking revenge epic starring Nicole Kidman, Alexander Skarsgård, and Anya Taylor-Joy. It's powerfully and expertly made by director Robert Eggers but has intense, mature violence and sexual situations. Expect gory battle scenes; characters being hit with…

Positive Messages

Although entire movie is a quest for revenge, the story eventually begins to show revenge's downsides: the violence, hate, and cyclical nature of it.

Positive Role Models

Characters are mainly seeking violence and revenge and ways to usurp power or gain control over others. While a lesson is learned, it's too late.

Diverse Representations

Driving force comes from White males (no notable non-White characters), but women have more power and agency here than women used to in movies like this. Women here make their own choices, exert their own power.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Extremely strong, gory violence. Long, bloody battles, fighting, hitting, bashing with weapons, head-butts, etc. Many bloody wounds. Fighters slathered in blood. Characters pierced with arrows, stabbed with swords, impaled with axes. A man rips another man's throat open with his teeth. Throat slicing. Severed heads. Bashed-in faces. Person's nose sliced off; mutilated face. Plucked-out eyes. Mutilated corpses hung from wall. Corpses with hearts carved out. Spilled intestines. Child stabbed (off-screen). Character attacked by dog, dog killed. Horse beheaded. Man stabs himself. Corpses hanging from trees. Naked male corpse. People bound in chains; depictions of slavery. Families are forcibly separated, with screaming young children taken from their parents. Woman hog-tied. Women roughly grabbed. Intense, eerie, nightmarish rituals. Scary stuff: witches, ghosts, the undead. Homes on fire. Vomiting. Incest. Rape is mentioned, and a man tries to have forced sex with an enslaved woman. In a group sex scene, it appears that some men might be forcibly grabbing women.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Woman's naked bottom. Several men and women appear to be having sex during a celebration, with kissing, thrusting, caressing of bottoms, obscured nudity in the shadows, partial bottoms and partial breasts seen, etc. Kissing. Suggestion of incest. Brief shot of a woman dressing, with a gown sliding down over her body. Crude, sex-related humor. Sex-related dialogue. Shirtless males. Naked male corpse. Woman lifts dress to reveal that she's menstruating; brief shot of blood. (Content related to sexual violence is in the "Violence" section.)

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Infrequent use of "bastard," "bitch," "whore," "hell," "swine," "piss."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters eat a mushroom stew and go on "bad trips." Social drinking in taverns.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Northman is a bloody Viking revenge epic starring Nicole Kidman , Alexander Skarsgård , and Anya Taylor-Joy . It's powerfully and expertly made by director Robert Eggers but has intense, mature violence and sexual situations. Expect gory battle scenes; characters being hit with arrows, swords, and axes; a man ripping another man's throat with his teeth; severed heads, mutilated faces, and mutilated corpses; and the suggested deaths of a child, dog, horse, and more. Families are forcibly separated. Several characters appear to have sex -- and some women appear to be forcibly grabbed -- with thrusting, touching, and partial bare bottoms and breasts seen. A man tries to rape an enslaved woman; she deters him by lifting her dress and showing him her menstrual blood. There are other sexual situations and sex-related dialogue, as well as uses of "bastard," "bitch," "whore," "hell," "swine," and "piss." Characters eat a "magic" mushroom stew and go on "bad trips," and there's social drinking in taverns. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (3)
• Kids say (8)

Based on 3 parent reviews

Definitely not for children or teens

One of the most solid films i have seen in a long time, what's the story.

Loosely inspired by Shakespeare's Hamlet , THE NORTHMAN opens in the year 895, with King Aurvandill War-Raven ( Ethan Hawke ) returning home to his wife, Queen Gudrún ( Nicole Kidman ), and young son, Amleth (Oscar Novak), after a long voyage. The king's brother, Fjölnir ( Claes Bang ), arrives and betrays him, assassinating him in a sneak attack. Amleth sees his mother being kidnapped and flees, vowing revenge. Years later, he has become a fearsome Viking ( Alexander Skarsgård ). When Amleth encounters a witch and learns Fjölnir's location, he disguises himself as an enslaved person and boards a ship for Iceland. He meets a healer named Olga ( Anya Taylor-Joy ) and forms an unexpected bond with her. Forced to labor on a remote farm, Amleth meets another witch and is told the location of a magic sword. With the sword, Amleth begins to carry out his revenge, killing Fjölnir's men one by one. But before he battles Fjölnir himself in a fiery showdown, Amleth must face a terrible truth -- and make an impossible decision.

Is It Any Good?

Director Robert Eggers has created a powerful saga full of passion, rage, and dark fantasy. As with his remarkable debut feature The Witch , Eggers seems to have poured a ton of research into The Northman , as well as teaming with veteran Icelandic writer Sjón ( Lamb ) to capture an eerie authenticity. It feels like being transported back in time, rather than watching actors in costumes. Even though there's actually little going on here outside of a revenge plot, the movie has weight to it, something at stake. It feels like it was created by people who take pride in their craft.

Recalling David Lowery's entrancing The Green Knight , The Northman switches with ease from earthy battle sequences slippery with mud and gore to unreal sequences of witches or Valkyries, all belonging to the same world. Yet as he proved with his previous movie, The Lighthouse , Eggers is equally skilled with actors and characters. The performances here are all impressive, but Kidman in particular can be so ferocious and startling that her work may feel like an actual sting. As for the overarching revenge plot, it does take 137 minutes to march toward the inevitable. But once it gets there, it does so with a surprisingly primal, visual palette, and it also manages to show the act as an exhausting, ever spiraling curse without end.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Northman 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How is sex depicted in the movie? Which moments are problematic? Why? Have values changed since the time of the Vikings?

Why do you think Amleth ultimately chose revenge? Why might it have been extremely difficult for him to choose love and healing instead? Why is it difficult for us to pursue things we haven't been exposed to?

What's the appeal of Viking stories? What can we learn from that time and place?

How are women represented in the movie? Do they have their own agency and power?

Movie Details

• In theaters : April 22, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : May 13, 2022
• Cast : Alexander Skarsgard , Anya Taylor-Joy , Nicole Kidman
• Director : Robert Eggers
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Latino actors
• Studio : Focus Features
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Topics : Magic and Fantasy
• Run time : 137 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong bloody violence, some sexual content and nudity
• Last updated : April 1, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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• DVD & Streaming

The Northman

Content caution.

In Theaters

• April 22, 2022
• Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth; Anya Taylor-Joy as Olga of the Birch Forest; Claes Bang as Fjölnir the Brotherless; Ethan Hawke as King Aurvandil War-Raven; Nicole Kidman as Queen Gudrún; Willem Dafoe as Heimir the Fool; Björk as Seeress

Home Release Date

• May 12, 2022
• Robert Eggers

Distributor

• Focus Features

Movie Review

I will avenge my father. I will save my mother. I will kill my uncle.

Amleth whispers those teeth-clenched words over and over as he pulls away from shore, straining with all his remaining strength at the small skiff’s oars. He had seen his father betrayed and riddled with arrows that night.

His father, the king, had been beheaded by his own brother. His kingdom stolen. And then as Amleth ran through the village—hiding and running from building to building to avoid his uncle’s men—he saw his fair mother grabbed and tossed over a strong shoulder like a bag of grain.

But even keen-eyed warriors can’t always catch sight of a small boy hiding in the streets. And so Amleth finds his way to the docks and leaves the vile carnage of the village behind.

It may take time: he’ll need experience at killing, years of hardened muscle and many scars before he’s ready. But someday he will return … to avenge his father, save his mother and kill one hated man.

That is a vow that Odin will not fail to hear.

It is young prince Amleth’s destined and bloody fate.

Positive Elements

Through most of the film, Amleth appears to be nothing more than a heartless man set on some form of savage vengeance. But he is touched by the charms of an earth mystic named Olga. He even exposes himself to great harm to protect her—something he would normally not do.

There is a brief moment when it appears that Amleth’s feelings for Olga might cause him to change direction, perhaps to push against his fate and raise a family. (But fate and Odin’s will win out.)

During a ritual with his father, Amleth swears he will safeguard his family and live in honor. (Though how, exactly, he keeps those vows is left open to a bloody interpretation.)

Spiritual Elements

From the film’s opening moments until the Valkyrie’s flying horse ride to heaven at the movie’s close, The Northman is jam-packed with Norse mythology.

There are numerous references to Norse lore and old Norse gods here. As a coming-of-age ritual, for instance, Amleth and his father walk through a ceremony of devotion to Odin. They crawl around and howl like wolve before a large stone altar and take vows to the gods together. Amleth has a vision of his royal lineage’s “tree of kings”: a large tree littered with skeletons, corpses and living men.

Throughout Amleth’s life, Odin shows up in a variety of forms—as a witch; a shaman; a flock of crows; and as a ghostly, bearded image—to remind Amleth of his unwavering and unavoidable fate.

Indeed, the film declares that mans’ fate is predetermined and set. An individual’s will is a part of life; but a person’s decisions only reallreall matter insofar as they entertains the gods’ fancy and eventually lead to the expected outcome. Whenever Amleth veers even slightly from his path of fate, it results in his pain and injury.

Odin, in shaman form, holds up a man’s desiccated head and that lopped off noggin talks to Amleth and gives him some fate-focused guidance. Amleth also gives battle to a huge, undead Viking in a quest to obtain a deadly blood weapon that can only be drawn at night.

When Amleth first meets Olga, she is known by others as a “spell speaker,” a mystic who communes with the earth gods. We see her chanting spells in a foreign tongue and speaking to those spirits on several occasions. She and Amleth both have visions about the future of their union. In fact, when Amleth first tells her of his quest to kill Fjölnir, his uncle, she tells him: “Your strength breaks men’s bones; I’m coming to break their minds.”

We see others, including Fjölnir, pray to Odin for guidance. When some of Fjölnir’s men are butchered and then hung up in a ritualistic manner, the chieftain wonders if it’s his Christian slaves (foreign captives who are branded with the image of a cross) who have done the horrible deed. One of Fjölnir’s men reasons that it must be the Christians at fault since “their god is a corpse nailed to a tree.”

In response to this murder, Fjölnir has a witch go about the process of sacrificing one of the Christian slaves. However, Amleth upends the killing, setting the female slave free and instead sacrificing the witch and her assistant.

During a funeral for one of Fjölnir’s sons, a horse is beheaded and the blood sprinkled about. And then a female singer is also killed and placed on the same floating skiff that’s used as a funeral pyre for the corpse. Later we see two corpses laid out beside a dead, beheaded horse in a similar makeshift funeral near a hillside.

A screaming Valkyrie in full armor rides up into the heavens with a man’s corpse in tow.

Sexual Content

A large group of men and women run naked in the woods during a celebration. We see them embracing and kissing and then having sex on the ground and up against trees. It’s during this sequence that Amleth and Olga slip away to get intimate in the woods as well. We see them writhing naked on the ground together and the camera watches closely as they have sex and then cuddle and talk afterward. (Both are fully naked with key areas strategically covered.) Later we see the pair naked in a hot spring, where her bare backside is completely visible.

A young Amleth runs in to see his mother, catching her as she is just slipping into a cotton shift—exposing her legs and a quick glimpse of her backside. A court jester makes some sexual quips about a man’s arousal. We see men whipping themselves into a savage rage before a battle—all shirtless in either breeches or loincloths.

Amleth learns that his mother sexually betrayed his father with another man. She tells him that the king’s “affection was only for silver and rutting his whores.”

When Fjölnir first sees Olga, he’s taken by her beauty and asks that she be made available for his pleasure. Later, he to pull her aside for sex, but she declares that it’s during her menstrual cycle. Pulling up her skirts, she removes her blood-soaked cloth and shoves it in his face.

Then Amleth’s mother tries to seduce him , caressing and kissing him and promising that he could be her new king. We see Fjölnir naked from the rear while conducting a funeral. And later he and Amleth both battle each other while fully naked. They fight in front of a glowing lake of lava, however, so much of the action is seen in silhouette and only partially lit.

Violent Content

This grim story unleashes viscerally savage and graphically realistic images of death-dealing. We witness an unending stream of that barbarous destruction.

After the film’s opening moments, for instance, Amleth’s father comes back from a months-long Viking raid with slaves in tow and a horrid gash in his abdomen. He unwraps the bloody wound to show his son and sticks the boy’s fingers into its gore. Soon after that, he gets attacked by betrayers from his own clan who hit him with several arrows. As he struggles to fight them off, they drive spears into him and finally behead him.

While on his own, the young Amleth is taken in by another group of Vikings who raise him in the ways of war. These battlers whip themselves into a howling frenzy before combat and then storm forts to butcher every living person there except those suitable for human slavery. Covered head to foot in blood, we see them hack away at men, women and children with raging glee. An adult and hugely muscled Amleth joins them. We see him attack one man and rip the man’s neck open with his teeth, sucking in the flesh and gore before howling like a beast.

Upon setting off on his quest for vengeance, Amleth brands himself with a searing branding iron to pass as a slave. And then, after being accepted into a group of slave laborers, he unleashes a string of terrorist-like attacks on his unsuspecting captors. He kills several night guards, for instance, and then hacks their bodies into pieces to create a grotesque collage of flesh and wooden pikes.

Amleth participates in a hard-hitting, and in some cases, deadly game held by slaves for the amusement of the Viking clansmen. In it, men are pummeled with sticks and bash at each other while trying to score goals. At one point, a young boy runs onto the field and a huge competitor slams the boy to the ground, knocking him unconscious. That bear-like man then moves to strike the boy a deadly blow before Amleth runs in to save him—crushing the man’s skull with repeated blows from his own.

We see many hacked and slashed battlers. Men are stabbed repeatedly. Limbs and heads are lopped off, throats slashed. One wounded man hobbles into a hut before his slashed open entrails spill out onto the floor. Another naked man is hung upside down by his feet, his entrails hanging out and his genitals removed. Amleth kills a young man and then cuts out his heart to keep for future needs.

In addition to all that, Amleth is beaten down when he faces too many foes alone. He’s strung up and tortured. We see him stabbed and slashed repeatedly.

After a raiding party of Vikings takes a town, we see the warriors feasting and passing the village’s attractive women around for implied sexual acts. (The women are battered and weeping but clothed when we see them.)

Crude or Profane Language

There are several uses of the word “b–tard” and a couple references to “H—.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Men drink with abandon after several different battles and contests. Some getting decidedly inebriated. Olga uses a special mushroom to create a soup with hallucinogenic properties that cause men to fall unconscious and/or see terrible visions, in some cases to the point of stabbing themselves. Amleth and his father lap up bowls of some sort of drug-laced beverage that give them a shared vision.

Other Negative Elements

Amleth and his father pass gas as a part of a ritual. After Amleth fights an undead creature, he beheads it and sticks its face into its own backside.

Men get drunk and vomit. A drugged soup causes several to vomit as well.

The Northman is dark, angry and brutal. Director Robert Eggers’ ambitious take on a fatalistic tale of vengeance and death—”the story of a prince destined for Valhalla”—is how a bloody piece of Norse mythology might look if filmed with a cinematographer’s eye. It feels mercilessly authentic: a grunting, raging, muscle-straining bellow translated to movie form.

Of course, that doesn’t make it entertaining, per se. One shouldn’t go in expecting an interesting or redeeming storyline, or characters that you can care about. Or anything with heart, for that matter. This pic plods and hacks in a predictable and bloody straight line, and its resolution is as inescapable as it proclaims old Norse mystic fate to be.

Put simply, this is a film of heavily muscled men raging, rutting and ravaging while Norse gods pull their puppet strings.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Movie Review – The Northman (2022)

June 3, 2022 by admin

The Northman , 2022.

Directed by Robert Eggers. Starring Alexander Skarsgård, Anya Taylor-Joy, Claes Bang, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Gustav Lindh, and Björk.

A young Viking prince embarks on an epic quest to avenge his father’s death.

Robert Eggers broke into the Hollywood scene in 2015 with his period horror flick The Witch . The genre defining piece not only launched the career of the uber talented Anya Taylor-Joy but also cemented Eggers as a talented auteur we should keep an eye out for. In 2019, Eggers once again embraced his horror roots with the atmospheric chiller The Lighthouse , which featured a duet of ferocious performances by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. Shortly after its release, Eggers announced that for his next project, he’d be directing an epic Viking revenge saga inspired by ancient Norse mythology. The inception of The Northman , however, took place a few years prior during one of Eggers’ trips to Iceland, which lent an opportunity to meet Björk and Icelandic poet Sjón. Skarsgård too had previously expressed interest in crafting an Old Norse saga with Eggers and thus, the ingredients for the film unexpectedly came together. Eggers and Sjón based their screenplay on the legend of Amleth written by 12th Century Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, the inspiration for William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and with a $65 million budget principal photography commenced at Northern Ireland with its stacked ensemble cast on August 2020.

If one were to simply describe Eggers’ The Northman , you could say that it’s the love child of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Nicholas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising . The explicit violence, bleak atmosphere, exquisite imagery and historically-accurate setting are all stunning parallels that both Refn’s Viking tale and The Northman share. But that’s not to say that Eggers’ effort is subpar, no sir. The brutal nature of the Norseman’s savage world is brought to life in exquisite and barbaric detail, sans compromise, by the talented young director. This is as immersive a theatrical experience as they come. Starting off his career with low-budget affairs, it must be said that, Eggers’ transition to the big leagues is simply flawless. That chap is a stickler for detail, as evidenced by his work on The Witch and The Lighthouse , but the larger budget has afforded him the unenviable opportunity to realise his desired vision for The Northman unhindered.

With two fiercely original entries already under his belt, what Eggers has accomplished here certainly doesn’t come as a surprise for anyone. This is a Robert Eggers film through and through, and his signature style is evident in every mood-oozing frame of the movie. This is of course is no happy accident. Eggers worked closely with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, who nabbed an Academy award nomination for his work on The Lighthouse , in crafting the specific look and tone needed for The Northman . There is a strange, ethereal patina imbued to every shot, that makes even the most violent, blood-soaked scene stunning to behold. This is a world perpetually battered by the primal elements; drenched from rain, smothered by snow and warmed through fire. A place of divine beauty and unrestrained barbarism. And the degree of tactility Blaschke captures through his lens is otherworldly. Still, his hauntingly monochromic cinematography for The Lighthouse remains my clear favourite. The score is another integral component of this film. Crafted by UK based electronic artists Sebastian Gainsborough and Robin Carolan, the duo’s evocative music – replete with archaic instrumentations and otherworldly sounds – take the listener on its own surreal trip; bowel-shuddering, nightmare inducing journey into the heart of darkness.

Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård has stepped up his game the past few years, seeking edgier character driven roles while trying to shed the teen heartthrob True Blood persona which brought him recognition in the first place. His performance as an abusive husband in David E. Kelley’s HBO television drama series Big Little Lies earned Skarsgård numerous accolades and this year we see him take on the role of a vengeance fueled, blood-crazed Norseman. It isn’t a nuanced performance per se, but a straightforward one which more than adequately gets the job done. He also cuts quite the imposing figure as a towering hulk of muscle and rage, decimating everything in his path. The guy’s a proverbial force of nature and then some. Anya Taylor-Joy who got her big break on The Witch , returns to work on Eggers’ latest effort, delivering quite the mercurial turn as Olga the Slavic sorceress. She is compassionate and kind as Amleth’s lover, but calculating, vicious and deeply distrusting with others. She is an individual who’d do whatever it takes to survive. Claes Bang who gained international recognition by starring as Count Dracula in the 2020 BBC/Netflix series Dracula plays Amleth’s uncle Fjölnir. Bang not only turns in an incredibly nuanced performance but also matches Skarsgård’s formidable physicality with his own. Nicole Kidman has the least screentime in The Northman but goddamn if she doesn’t bring in her A-game when she needs to.

The Northman is a compelling revenge drama, of that there is no doubt. There’s enough internecine bloodletting, unexpected revelations, gripping performances and evocative imagery to keep you invested throughout. But what makes it extra-special is that it also offers a fleeting, uncompromising glimpse of an ancient civilization and a lost culture that many have now forgotten through the passage of time.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★

Hasitha Fernando is a part-time medical practitioner and full-time cinephile. Follow him on Twitter via @DoctorCinephile for regular updates on the world of entertainment.

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‘The Northman’: Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman get fierce in a boldly bloody Viking saga

Epic holds our attention with unforgettable visuals and the sheer, raw audacity of its premise..

Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) plots to take down the man who killed his father and took his throne and his wife in “The Northman.”

Focus Features

“I will avenge you, Father. I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir.” — The Viking warrior Almeth’s mantra in “The Northman.”

Robert Eggers’ bloody and bone-cracking and yet beautiful Viking saga “The Northman” is set primarily in 10th-century Iceland—but every frame of this 137-minute epic makes us feel as if we’ve been plunged neck-deep into the violent dread of Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell. Even the kings and queens and landowners in this fiery fever dream seem miserable and unfulfilled, while just about everyone else is either a brutally cruel henchman guarding and abusing slaves in forced labor camps, or one of the legions of slaves who are treated as sub-human creatures.

This is not to say “The Northman” itself is unrelentingly grim. Director Eggers (“The Witch,” “Lighthouse”) is a boldly creative visionary, and his stunning visuals and hallucinatory staging of scenes makes for the kind of movie that really should be seen on the big screen. Drawing on the same well of Scandinavian culture and folklore (with a sprinkling of known historical events) that provided the foundation for Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Eggers and his co-writer, the Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón, have crafted a sprawling and visceral tale with elements of everything from “Gladiator” to “Conan the Barbarian” to “Braveheart,” and at times it reminded me of a particularly pricey episode of “Game of Thrones.” Greatly enhancing that mix is a cast of some of our most interesting actors, from Ethan Hawke to Nicole Kidman to Anya Taylor-Joy to the Skarsgårds Alexander and Bill to Willem Dafoe as “Heimir the Fool” and if you’re casting your Viking epic and there’s a call for a “Heimir the Fool,” who better to answer that call than Willem Dafoe?

“The Northman” opens with an extended prologue in which King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) returns from war, wounded but victorious, where he is greeted by his loyal, long-locked wife Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman) and his adoring young son Amleth (Oscar Novak). The celebration is short-lived, however, when Aurvandil’s nefarious and bloodthirsty brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang), murders the king and takes the queen as his own bride.

The terrified but resourceful young Amleth (and yes, Shakespeare created “Hamlet” as an anagram for “Amleth”) manages to escape, at which point we flash forward some 20 years, with Alexander Skarsgård taking on the role of Amleth, who is all dirty and muddy and battered and bruised but is also so built and so ripped it looks as if he discovered the first Equinox gym and hasn’t skipped a workout in years. Amleth has become a great Viking warrior, but he becomes a stowaway and deliberately surrenders to slavery just so he can infiltrate the remote plantation farm owned by evil ol’ Uncle Fjölnir, whose reign was apparently cut short—but hey, it appears he got a pretty sweet real estate deal as part of his exile.

Along the way, Amleth meets and instantly falls in love with a Slavic slave named Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), who has a fiercely independent personality and just might be a sorceress, but probably not, but maybe. Once Amleth arrives at his destination, he’s shocked to see his mother is still with Fjölnir (neither Almeth’s uncle nor mother recognizes him), appears to be happy and has even given him a son, Thorir (Gustav Lindh). Before Amleth confronts his mother to see if she still needs saving, before he faces off with his murderous uncle in the inevitable duel to the death, the story makes room for all kinds of violence, madness, sorcery, special effects and award-worthy costumes. Why, there’s even time for a deadly match of a sport that appears to be a cross between croquet, cricket and Quidditch, only with extreme violence and the bashing of skulls.

Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), Amlet’s mother, ends up married to her husband’s killer.

With director Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke alternating between vibrant bursts of saturated colors and muted tones of stormy skies filled with ominous clouds and flocks of ravens (there’s a reason the official term for a flock is “Unkindness of Ravens”) and snowflakes that dance in the sky like embers in the aftermath of a deadly fire, “The Northman” holds our attention with the unforgettable visuals and the sheer, raw audacity of its premise and its unrelenting violence. Alexander Skarsgård has never been the most emotive of actors, but he’s perfectly cast here as the ferociously vengeance-minded Amleth, with Anya-Taylor Joy lending her wonderful ethereal weirdness (and I mean that in the best possible way) to Olga. Nicole Kidman is only nine years older than Skarsgård and there’s no attempt to age her character over the decades, proving that even in the 10 th century, Hollywood never blinks at this sort of gender-biased aging of actresses, but she delivers effectively duplicitous work while Dafoe and Hawke lend bearded intensity to their outstanding supporting performances. (There’s never a scene in this film in which we don’t have the pleasure of watching at least one great actor leaning all the way into the material.)

“The Northman” is often insanely over the top and there are moments when it feels as if Eggers could maybe ease his foot off the pyrotechnic pedals, but still, this is one of the most strikingly original and brutally effective movies of the year so far.

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‘The Northman’ Review: Robert Eggers’ Viking Epic Goes So Hard You’ll Feel Like You’ve Died and Gone to Valhalla

David ehrlich.

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All you really need to know about “ The Northman ” — a $90 million Viking revenge saga directed by Robert Eggers — is that every single minute of it feels like a $90 million Viking revenge saga directed by Robert Eggers. Both parts of that equation are worth celebrating outside of and in addition to the movie’s other merits.

Even if “The Northman” had been a dreadful bore — and not a primal, sinewy, gnarly-as-fuck 10th century action epic that starts with a hallucinogenic Viking bar mitzvah, features Björk ’s first narrative film performance since “Dancer in the Dark,” and ends with two mostly naked men fighting to the death atop an erupting volcano — the simple fact that financiers had the chutzpah to bankroll such a big swing in the face of our blockbuster-or-bust theatrical climate would have felt like a (pyrrhic) victory against the forces of corporate homogenization, no matter who was behind the camera.

That “The Northman” was entrusted to a fetishistically uncompromising young auteur whose previous movie was a single-location sea shanty best-remembered for mermaid vaginas and Willem Dafoe asking, “Why’d you spill your beans!?” makes it even riskier to slot into multiplexes between “Sonic 2” and “MCU 28.” That the finished product viscerally feels like the work of the same artist — despite well-documented attempts to water it down — makes it something of a miracle.

And yet, in an environment so neutered by empty spectacle that critics have been conditioned to do Cirque du Soleil-level backflips for anything even slightly less than obvious — an environment in which mild surprises are treated like government secrets, and the shock of the new is such a rare event that we tend to relay it with the breathlessness of a UFO sighting — it’s important to note that “The Northman” isn’t satisfying just because it’s fun to see Eggers’ fingerprints smudged into every frame of such a big movie. It’s also (and more rewardingly) satisfying because the director’s signature handicraft allows “The Northman” to dismantle its modern context and retell a Viking legend with such raw immediacy that its fjords of blood seem freshly spilled for the first time in 1,000 years.

“The Northman” may fall short of being Eggers’ best film (its terse savagery doesn’t leave room for the emotional layering that allowed “The Witch” to burn so dark), but it’s undoubtedly the peak of his continuing effort to return some integrity to the past; to level the playing field between now and then by shooting period folklore with such historic fidelity that we experience it in the present tense. Just as “The Witch” is so unsettling because it renders sin with a Puritan sense of mortal danger, and “The Lighthouse” so febrile because it embodies the isolation of 19th century life on the fringes of sanity, “The Northman” is so grab-you-by-the-throat intense because it renders a Viking prince’s quest for vengeance as though fate were a force as real as the weather.

And that’s exactly how it might have seemed to a Norse warrior in the North Atlantic circa 915 A.D. His priorities displace our own; his moral urgency overpowers whatever “civilized” moral code we try to force onto this ancient story. If “Hamlet” is often reductively (and destructively) summed up as a tragedy about someone who can’t make up their mind, “The Northman” — which is based on the violent legend that inspired Shakespeare’s play — is about someone who never really had a choice.

All things are equal for Prince Amleth (initially seen as a 10-year-old boy played by Oscar Novak), who was born into a world where Valhalla is a place as real as the stony castle where he waits for his father, King Aurvandill War-Raven (a regal yet shifty Ethan Hawke), to return from war. And when he does, Aurvandill decides that it’s time for his son to become a man — a process that involves drinking spiked mead, howling at the moon while Heimir the Fool (Willem Dafoe) dances around them in a frenzy, and then looking upon the ghosts of dead kings that are hanging from Amleth’s family tree. “The Northman” doesn’t slow down to explain why Aurvandill is already among them, since Eggers refuses to make exposition out of anything that his characters might already know, but we get our answer soon enough.

The very next morning, in fact, as Amleth’s hot uncle Fjölnir the Brotherless (Claes Bang) makes good on his name by slaughtering Aurvandill and kidnapping the newly widowed Queen Gudrún ( Nicole Kidman , finding all sorts of wonderfully florid notes in her role as a cunning damsel in distress). Fjölnir’s henchman assures him that Amleth — the rightful heir to the throne — has been drowned at sea, but that’s not entirely accurate. The truth is that Amleth has escaped, and, in the span of a single cut that spans 20 years, will grow up to be a homicidal berserker the size of a small house, “a beast cloaked in manflesh,” who pillages Slavic villages with his pals in order to feed his insatiable appetite for death while he scours the earth for his uncle.

Played by a hulking Alexander Skarsgård , whose human bulldozer of a performance channels the actor’s usual menace in a compellingly ambivalent new direction, adult Amleth is basically what would happen if Tarzan micro-dosed the T-virus from “Resident Evil” every day for two straight decades. A swollen husk of a man who’s literally hunched from the hatred he’s been carrying since he was a child (or maybe that’s just what happens to someone’s posture when their neck muscle looks like a boa constrictor trying to digest a whole poodle), the guy doesn’t even flinch when his buddies arrow down some local peasants for sport. At one point, he catches a javelin from mid-air with his bare hand and hurls it back at the sentry who threw it in one fluid motion; it’s the start of a raid that Eggers choreographs in a brutal yet harrowingly even-keeled long-take, one of several transportive sequence shots that lend physical weight to the inertia of Amleth’s destiny.

And this is a character who moves forward on nothing but the wayward momentum of his own vengeance, which seems to have steered him off-course along the way. What he wants is clear — drink every time Amleth mutters “I will avenge you, father. I will save you, mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir” and you’ll be dead long before he can do any of those things — but the man is little more than a mantra. He doesn’t have any quips or heroic tendencies. He never smiles. The only truly relatable thing about Amleth is that he gets valuable life advice from Björk, who brings raspy perfection to her brief cameo as a magical seeress who shows up to remind the former prince of his path.

His only soft spot is for a slave named Olga of the Birch Forest ( Anya Taylor-Joy , going for a Gaga-like Transylvanian accent that benefits from being in a film of such extreme verisimilitude that even the most ridiculous choices feel right), who Amleth meets after learning that Fjölnir has absconded to Iceland, and deciding to disguise himself as one of his uncle’s newest purchases. And yet even the warmth that she inspires from him feels like a gnawing distraction from the task at hand. Kindness for his kin and hatred for his enemies might not be as mutually exclusive as those paths are first presented to Amleth, but little of the film’s tightly contained second half is spent hemming and hawing over what he will do next. On the contrary, “The Northman” only draws closer to the essence of Amleth’s fate as he ingratiates himself to Fjölnir by day and terrorizes his settlement by night, a cycle that’s segmented with chapter titles (e.g. “The Night Blade Feeds”) that reflect the morbid humor of a film that’s often funny but never in a winking sort of way.

There are plenty of reasons to laugh during this movie, or at least shake your head in smiling disbelief at the extent of its brutality (brace for a new riff on a human centipede), but the “jokes” don’t foster a sense of ironic detachment so much as they chip away at it. For all of the talk about Eggers’ obsessive attention to historical detail, the right chain mail or piece of embroidery is ultimately in service to the form and perspective of a film that puts you in the mindset of someone who lived by some very different principles.

Co-written by Eggers and the Icelandic poet Sjón, “The Northman” doesn’t appeal to modern notions of manliness or morality so much as it makes literal bloodsport of their limitations. Even when the foundations of Amleth’s quest are shaken at their deepest level, and it would seem to require a greater degree of strength to abandon his mission than to see it through, Eggers refuses to judge his protagonist. Amleth may be a dumb brute, but this movie finds an unalloyed kernel of beauty in the story of a warrior fulfilling their purpose. His story may have inspired one of Shakespeare’s most wounded tragedies, but “The Northman” can’t help but see a measure of ecstasy in a life of unyielding purpose.

As the seeress tells Amleth: “It is not enough to be the man who never cries.”

If anything, Amleth takes those words too close to heart, just as Eggers is so focused on the emotional fidelity of his Viking epic that he seems afraid of making any concessions to melodrama. He seems afraid of leaving any openings that a studio might have been able to exploit in order to manufacture a certain audience response. The one truly discomforting moment of vulnerability (you’ll know it when you see it) is an outlier in a film that’s often as clenched and withholding as its hero. “The Northman” doesn’t quite figure out a way to reconcile the merciless linearity of its story with the kind of flourishes that might allow it to register on a deeper level, as its confined setting and relatively limited scale (even on that $90 million budget) enforce a smallness that’s at odds with the sheer weight of its vision.

But “The Northman” is never dull. The sheer muscularity of Eggers’ direction denies it that chance, as even the simplest scenes of Amleth glowering at his enemies or trudging through Fjölnir’s primordial farmland (Northern Ireland absolutely nailing its performance as Iceland) are bracingly rendered as steps on the road to Valhalla. Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough’s pounding score pumps the story full of blood like the heart of a whale, while Jarin Blaschke’s frostbitten cinematography allows the film to flatten mud-and-shit history into the stuff of “Elden Ring” high fantasy until they feel equally true, both for Amleth and for us. Also, someone gets decapitated like every 10 minutes.

It’s not like this movie is a punishing chore; it’s not like Eggers doesn’t want multiplex audiences to like it. And they will. Because this is the kind of filmmaking that rips you out of your body so hard that you’re liable to forget what year it is. In a movie era that’s been defined by compromise, “The Northman” rides into theaters with the fury of a valkyrie — it’s the rare studio epic that would sooner die than submit to modern precepts of how it should be told. While so many people in the industry are scrambling to change their fates, Eggers reminds us just how awesome it can feel to conquer them.

Focus Features will release “The Northman” in theaters on Friday, April 22.

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• Coma mixes animation styles with live-action filmmaking to create a vibrant sensory treat that's simultaneously nightmarish and hopeful.

There's arguably no director working today like the French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello , who somehow manages to have one finger on the pulse of the real world, yet also approaches current affairs with a decidedly surrealist sensibility. Indeed, his filmography feels simultaneously familiar and esoteric, immediately recognizable in the human problems his movies seek to explore, but also, because of his propensity for dream-like imagery and reliance on feeling rather than logic, sometimes difficult to digest or access. Not that this is a bad thing, of course. Bonello's newest release, Coma , benefits greatly from his visual trademarks as a director: a nightmare underlined by hope, the film is a paradoxical treat for the senses.

Coma follows an unnamed teenager (played by Louise Labèque), who is forced to stay at home as a result of a global health crisis. Alone and listless, the teen spends her days hopping from one distraction to another, whether it's through FaceTime calls with friends or binge-watching videos by a YouTuber with an unnerving personality, named Patricia Coma (Julia Faure). As her anxiety about the future heightens, the teen's dreams and nightmares start to blur with reality, and we are sucked into her psyche, which spills onto the screen with visual splendor.

Coma Functions as a Modern Period Piece

Coma (2022).

Combining animation and live action, it tells the story of a teenage girl who is locked in her house during a global health crisis and navigates between dreams and reality, until she starts following a disturbing and mysterious YouTuber named Patricia Coma.

Release Date November 16, 2022

Director Bertrand Bonello

Cast Julia Faure, Gaspard Ulliel, Anais Demoustier, Louis Garrel, Laetitia Casta

Runtime 1h 20m

Genres Drama, Mystery, Fantasy

Writers Bertrand Bonello

Studio(s) My New Picture, Les Films du Blier

Distributor(s) Film Movement

• A vibrant treat for the senses that mixes mediums in a dreamlike way.
• Coma beautifully balances a nightmarish anxiety with an ultimate message of hope.
• The delay in distribution means that Coma feels oddly dated.

Foremost, there are two interesting factors to consider with regard to Coma 's arrival in North American theaters. The first is that the film initially premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2022 , before releasing in French cinemas the following November. This is important because it was made in direct response to the emotional turmoil at the height of COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020/2021, which would have naturally been fresher in audience's minds in 2022.

In 2024 (and especially in North America), however, COVID-19 is no longer as generally reported on, talked about, or seen as a threat (even though it continues to spread and evolve). This raises the question of relevance: will audiences today, who have largely placed COVID-19 in their rearview mirrors, connect with the story of a young woman in the midst of a pandemic?

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10 TV Shows That Feel Like a Fever Dream

The truth is that Coma feels like a modern period piece. After all, it's set in a past that we, as a society, may have successfully distanced ourselves from, but are still in emotional proximity with. In this way, Bonello's film is a deeply affecting artifact of sorts: a text that is very clearly situated in a certain time, but with an exposed beating heart that's eternal, ripe for analysis, and, in turn, a launchpad for self-reflection.

Yes, Coma shares a lot of key filmmaking techniques we saw in movies considered to be part of this era of COVID or pandemic cinema — single-location (or minimal location) stories; screenlife motifs, actors alone on-screen, etc. — but Bonello's touch prevents a lot of these features from feeling like obvious ways of working around on-set COVID-19 protocols.

Mixing Animation Styles with Live-Action to Make a Fever Dream

Particularly noteworthy are the nightmare sequences in which we, from the teenager's POV, slowly make our way through a creepy forest, meeting all sorts of discernible-but-also-unknown figures. These recurring scenes feel reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project , brimming with confusion and anxiety. There's no clear logic here — it's all a dream, of course — which, as audiences who are awake, actually makes everything feel worse. The ground is less sturdy, we have no control over where we walk or look, and anything can literally happen.

Bonello emphasizes this "awake dream" through a mix of live-action and animation . In the teenager's room, toy dolls (filmed in stop-motion and voiced by a carousel of French talent, from Gaspard Ulliel to Louis Garrel) engage in a melodrama sub-plot that seems ripped from a soap opera. In another scene, in 2D-animation, the teenager interviews a serial killer she had seen in a documentary. Significantly, these animated scenes are firmly tied to the reality of the live-action, which lends Coma a feverish feel.

10 Movies That Feel Like a Nightmare

The relationship between coma and the beast.

The second interesting point to consider is that Coma follows Bonello's other film, The Beast , which was released in theaters last month, even though production completed on the former before work began on the latter. This is significant because, while Coma is set in the thick of the pandemic, the heart of The Beast beats to the rhythm of our current, "post-pandemic" world, unearthing questions about life, love, and longing against the backdrop of an increasingly advancing scientific society.

As you can read in our review , there's a lot of grief and lamentation in The Beast . The biggest concern its protagonist (played by Léa Seydoux) wrestles with is whether she would be a "better" human if she no longer felt any emotions, and she thus undergoes a procedure to try and rid herself of her feelings.

Meanwhile, the teenager in Coma arguably has nothing but her feelings to keep her company in isolation. What's more, Bonello asserts that, underneath the fear and anxiety, we will be okay. In fact, the film itself is dedicated to his then-teenage daughter, who would have come of age at one of the darkest points in our global memory . Of course, there's something to be said about Bonello coming from a hopeful stand with Coma and ending up somewhere, at best, embittered or, at worst, downright nihilistic with The Beast — and he wouldn't be wrong; these are indeed dark times. But perhaps it's serendipitous that we, in North America, ended up with Coma after The Beast. If there's ever a time to be reminded that we will be okay, it's certainly right now.

Coma is now playing in select theaters from Film Movement, with additional markets to follow.

The 7 Best Free Anime To Watch on Crunchyroll in May 2024

Anime's best shows are now available for free.

Crunchyroll has a truly ani-mazing selection for its Ani-May celebration. You probably already know that Crunchyroll is the streaming service to get for practically all of your anime needs. Subscribers have access to some of the best-animated stories from Japan ever created, including One Piece , My Hero Academia , and hundreds more.

Those shows alone make a Crunchyroll subscription worth a purchase, but let's say you haven't subscribed to Crunchyroll yet and want to sample some of what the service has to offer. Well, for their Ani-May event this month, some of the services finest shows are available to watch and stream completely free of charge. Wondering which shows you should start with? Here are seven of the best free shows you can watch on Crunchyroll this month .

'Chainsaw Man'

Starting things off with one of the bloodiest animated shows you'll ever watch, Chainsaw Man is a brutal entry into the massively popular superhero genre. In a world where the existence of demons is commonplace in society, a dying young man named Denji ( Kikunosuke Toya ) fuses with hiw own pet demon. The result transforms Denji into half-man, half-chainsaw, and he plans on using his serrated motorized blades to exact vengeance on the world's criminals. He's especially keen on getting even with the shadowy individuals he once trusted that left him for dead. Chainsaw Man is now available to stream on Crunchyroll .

Chainsaw Man

Watch on Crunchyroll

'Cowboy Bebop'

(1998-1999).

When you think of science fiction in anime, Cowboy Bebop is probably the very first thing that comes to mind. Along with Ghost in the Shell and Akira , the hit series helped lay the groundwork for the cyberpunk sub-genre, with its dark and twisted sci-fi universe feeling grounded and relatable. The show primarily follows the various missions and exploits of Spike Spiegel ( Kôichi Yamadera ) and his crew of bounty hunters as they bring in some of this sci-fi dystopia's deadliest criminals. It's a dangerous if not lucrative lifestyle, but one job the team takes on may be too much for them to handle. Cowboy Bebop is now available to stream on Crunchyroll .

Cowboy Bebop (1998)

The futuristic misadventures and tragedies of an easygoing bounty hunter and his partners.

'Frieren: Beyond Journey's End'

Most fantasy adventure stories follow a band of heroes as they go on an epic quest to vanquish an evil foe. That's more or less how the story of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End begins , but where the acclaimed series sets itself apart from other fantasy tales by taking place after that epic quest has already taken place. The titular elvish protagonist Frieren ( Atsumi Tanezaki ) and her band of companions successfully defeated the most dangerous force in the land, but now they have to adapt to everyday life following their daring journey. Frieren: Beyond Journey's End is now available to stream on Crunchyroll .

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End

An elf and her friends defeat a demon king in a great war. But the war is over, and the elf must search for a new way of life.

'Vinland Saga'

(2019-2023).

Vinland Saga could almost be called an anime version of The Northman . Vikings aren't a concept that is often adapted for the anime genre, but the violent and unforgiving world of Nordic society is a perfect fit for an anime revenge series. Starting from when he was only a boy, Thorfinn's ( Yûto Uemura ) life has been filled to the brim with death and tragedy. Now a grown man, he seeks to find the source of this tragedy and probe himself as a true warrior. Vinland Saga is available to stream on Crunchyroll .

Vinland Saga

Following a tragedy, Thorfinn embarks on a journey with the man responsible for it to take his life in a duel as a true and honorable warrior to pay homage.

'Yu Yu Hakusho: Ghost Files'

(1992-1995).

Have you ever watched R.I.P.D. and wished it was...you know...good? Well then Yu Yu Hakusho: Ghost Files is the show for you, and it's also one of the few anime shows that has a pretty good live-action iteration . Yûsuke Urameshi ( Nozomu Sasaki ) was a young, troubled teen who proved himself as something more when he saved a kid from a rapidly approaching car. Yûsuke did not survive, and as such, is sent to the underworld. Instead of enjoying his time in the afterlife, the underworld's leaders see something within Yûsuke and grant him the title of an Underworld Detective, being tasked with tracking down renegade demons that are still wreaking havoc in the mortal world. Yu Yu Hakusho: Ghost Files is now available to stream on Crunchyroll .

Yu Yu Hakusho

The story revolves around Yusuke Urameshi, a delinquent junior high school student who spends his days getting into fights. He dies after saving a child in a car accident, and gets resurrected to serve as an investigator of the supernatural.

'Dr. Stone'

Dr. Stone perhaps has one of the most unique concepts and worlds of any anime series on this list, which is an achievement in it of itself. The world in question one where almost the entirety of the world's population has been petrified, with nearly every living being on Earth being encased in rock and stone. It's a grim reality for this so-called "Stone World", but luckily, there is a young genius named Senku Ishigami ( Yûsuke Kobayashi ) who seems to have found a way to reverse these unusual petrification effects. Dr. Stone is now available to stream on Crunchyroll .

'Solo Leveling'

Last but not least, Solo Leveling is the most recent show on this list , and is already making waves as an exciting new anime series. In a world where monsters run rampant, Sung Jinwoo ( Taito Ban ) hopes to prove themselves as a worthy hunter. Doing so will take our hero on an exciting journey and evolution where they may become one of the most respected warriors in all the land. Solo Leveling is now available to stream on Crunchyroll .

Solo Leveling

In a world of gifted hunters and monsters, a weak hunter Sung Jinwoo gains extraordinary powers through a mysterious program, leading him to become one of the strongest hunters and conquering even the strongest dungeons.