The Northman — Robert Eggers’ Norse saga is a dazzling, bloody head-trip

“Drink the vision mead!” So a Viking shaman bellows at a teenage boy in The Northman, a wild Old Norse smörgåsbord from Robert Eggers. The film is heady enough almost to distract from the high stakes involved. For Eggers too, this is a rite of passage. Between his austere debut The Witch and maritime freakout The Lighthouse, the American director has found himself subject to breathless praise from the film community, fallen upon as the young auteur savant who might just save cinema from streamers and superheroes. He also spent a reported $90mn making his new film. Hence the hopeful ads on the sides of buses comparing the result to Gladiator. Between admirers and financiers, a lot is riding on The Northman. Have some more mead, Robert.

The vision Eggers aims for is the kind of 10th-century saga the Norse poets might have made themselves had they enjoyed access to a studio budget, Willem Dafoe and a pre-knowledge of Hamlet. (The script is by Eggers and Icelandic novelist Sjón.) “Hear me Odin,” the film demands, taking no chances by operating at the volume of Led Zeppelin scudding into Viking headbanger “Immigrant Song”. In time we glimpse both Valhalla and the gates of hell. But we open in fictional Hrafnsey, young princeling Amleth witnessing the murder of his father the king, and the abduction of his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman). Next time we meet, Amleth has grown into star Alexander Skarsgård. Now a berserker, he finally hears word of his father’s killer — lately a chieftain in Iceland. Under cover as a pillaged slave, Amleth arrives at the edge of the world to seek a vengeance specified as “flaming”.

“Bloody” goes without saying. Eggers stages gory mayhem with bravura technique. In the eerie Icelandic interior, a bond is formed with Anya Taylor-Joy’s fellow slave. The violence pauses. Not for long. The many eviscerations nudge the film near parody, enough offal on screen to suggest a nose-to-tail restaurant. Of Eggers’ previous two movies, I got on better with The Lighthouse, an expressionist cautionary tale that often played as mad black comedy. Here the tone is straight-faced. The Northman is no laughing matter, for all its runic affectations, Oedipal flourishes and the outsize gurning of Dafoe as a leery proto-Yorick.

And yet to make an honest Viking epic in 2022, the outlandish is non-negotiable. Our modern understanding of Norse society extends not just to bloodlust but a dense mesh of arcane beliefs and ritual hallucinogens. It is only historically accurate to be psychedelically far out. If $90mn has bought Eggers a lot of movie, he responds by unfailingly Going There. Among the head-trip spectacles, Björk turns up as an eyeless seer in porcupine headdress; a fabled tree of kings hangs with the bones of Viking royalty. But even low-key scenes brim with careful detail. Eggers treats the big screen reverently, like the last one he will ever get to make a film for.

Carnage aside, The Northman is some way from the stuff of school trips to York’s legendary Jorvik Viking Centre. Much of the history is stitched out of sight into the fabric of the film. Still, the plot turns on the Vikings as slavers of industrial scale. And when Kidman steals the movie with a wrathful howl, the reality of empire is what actors call her motivation. Likewise, another movie might hand Amleth the dreadful fate of being made relatable to a modern crowd — regretful of the need for such a body count. Mercifully, no.

You sense the authenticity is there not only for Eggers’ own satisfaction. It is part of the spell he wants to cast, one where myth and reality blur and his ardent, dexterous film-making pulls you feet-first and mesmerised into his movie. The magic doesn’t always work. But when it does, cinema itself still seems a bet worth taking.

★★★★☆

In cinemas from April 15