9 / 10
Official trailer
The Northman is Robert Eggers’s 2022 American historical action film and the director’s third feature. The film depicts Amleth, a 10th-century Viking prince who has spent his life preparing to avenge his father’s murder by his uncle. Alexander Skarsgård plays Amleth.
Nicole Kidman plays his mother Queen Gudrún. Claes Bang plays his uncle Fjölnir. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Olga, the Slavic captive who becomes Amleth’s ally. Eggers and Sjón wrote the screenplay.
Focus Features and New Regency produced the film on a budget of approximately seventy million dollars, and it was released in April 2022. The work represents the most expansive production in Eggers’s filmography.
Few films feel as ferocious to me as this one. Eggers made a Viking picture that seems dug out of a burial mound, all mud, blood and chanting, and he never once winks at a modern audience. My one small complaint is that Amleth’s single-mindedness keeps me at arm’s length, and that’s the only thing standing between it and a 10.
The film works as historical action and as study in the conditions of revenge as cultural commitment.
The work refuses the dramatic structure that mainstream action cinema typically deploys. The narrative organizes around Amleth’s particular revenge commitment that the wider Viking cultural background supports. The structural design uses sustained period accuracy combined with mythological elements to develop arguments about how cultural systems shape individual commitment. The work continues Eggers’s commitment to historical authenticity at considerably greater production scale than the director’s previous productions.
The Production Scale
Eggers works here at considerably greater production scale than his previous productions. The approximately seventy million dollar budget supported extensive location work in Iceland, Northern Ireland, and other locations. The production required serious extras casting, elaborate costume design, and complex action choreography. The scale represents Eggers’s transition from intimate indie production to serious commercial production while maintaining the director’s distinctive commitments.
The scale produced its own creative challenges. Eggers needed to hold on to historical authenticity at a size where conventional studio production would have sanded it down for accessibility. He held on, and that’s what I admire most about the film. Seventy million dollars would have been an easy excuse to make a generic sword movie, and instead every hut, costume and ritual feels researched down to the stitching.
For Writers
Creators can scale their production approach without abandoning their established commitments when they maintain creative resistance to commercial pressure. The Northman represents Eggers’s scale transition while maintaining his distinctive historical authenticity commitments. This applies to creative work broadly. Consider whether your scaling work requires abandoning established commitments or works effectively through their preservation. Sustained commitments often produce stronger work even at expanded scale.
The Skarsgård Performance
Alexander Skarsgård carries Amleth across a hundred and thirty-six minutes on sheer physical commitment, and I think it’s the best thing he’s done. He underwent serious physical preparation for the action, and it shows in every fight. He builds Amleth’s revenge through accumulated behavior instead of big speeches, and his stillness frightens me more than the battles do.
The performance also engages with the cultural background that the work depicts. Amleth sits within particular Viking cultural commitments that contemporary audiences may not initially recognize as authentic motivation. The actor establishes the character’s commitments through particular period behavior instead of through psychological structure familiar to contemporary audiences. The technique requires the audience to engage with the depicted cultural conditions on their own terms instead of through contemporary psychological translation.
For Writers
Period characters can work through distinct historical cultural commitments instead of through contemporary psychological structures. The Northman’s Amleth sits within authentic Viking cultural commitments instead of through translated psychological motivation. This applies to fiction with period content. Consider whether your period characters work through period-suitable structures or through translated contemporary psychology. The former requires careful preparation but produces work that historical accuracy alone can’t match.
The Mythological Integration
Norse mythological elements integrate with the immediate dramatic content. The depicted supernatural sequences, the recurring symbols, and the wider thematic structure draw from documented Norse cultural traditions. The mythology works as historical structure instead of as fantasy supplement. The work argues that Viking-era characters experienced their world through mythological structures that the film engages with as authentic perceptual reality.
The mythological integration also produces particular argumentative content. The work argues that revenge commitments in the depicted period worked through cultural and religious structures that contemporary audiences may not initially recognize as legitimate motivation.
The mythology provides the cultural context that makes Amleth’s particular commitments coherent. Cultural integration can support character motivation that contemporary structures would have left unmotivated.
The supernatural sequences are my favorite part of the film. Eggers plays them completely straight, never nudging the audience to treat them as dreams or metaphors, and that commitment is what makes the film work for me, because it puts me inside a head where the gods are as real as the weather.
For Writers
Cultural integration can support character motivation that contemporary structures would have left unmotivated. The Northman uses Norse mythological structure to motivate Amleth’s revenge commitments in ways that contemporary psychological structures couldn’t. This applies to fiction. Consider whether your characters’ motivations require cultural background that exceeds contemporary psychology.
Craft Note
Eggers’s collaboration with Sjón required careful preparation across screenplay development. The Icelandic novelist brought distinct knowledge of Norse cultural traditions that the screenplay required. The collaboration produced screenplay content that single-author work couldn’t have generated. The completed film works because the writers’ collaboration developed both historical authenticity and dramatic content together instead of treating them as separable elements. The lesson applies to creative collaboration broadly. Multi-author collaboration that integrates different cultural knowledge produces work that single-author approaches can’t match.
Is The Northman as good as people say?
The Northman is among the most ambitious contemporary American historical action films and shows Robert Eggers’s successful transition to serious commercial production.
The production scale shows how creators can maintain their established commitments at expanded scale. The Skarsgård performance establishes Amleth through period-suitable cultural structures. The mythological integration supports character motivation that contemporary psychology couldn’t have generated. The work is essential viewing for audiences interested in historical action cinema, in Eggers’s developing filmography, or in films that successfully scale established creative approaches to expanded production.
The 9 is for the nerve. Eggers took seventy million dollars and made a Viking revenge epic that refuses to translate itself for a modern audience, and I enjoyed every muddy minute of it. It loses a point because Amleth is so locked into his vow that I admire him more than I feel for him. Go in ready to take the Norse world on its own terms, and it’ll flatten you.
