Robert Eggers
The Northman

Contains hints of spoilers.

I'm returning to write on Debaser after countless years to express my impressions after watching (in the original language) The Northman, the third directorial effort from American Robert Eggers. I'm doing it because it seems to me that, much like with Nolan, there's a growing formation of "Eggersian" fans for whom Eggers' films are all masterpieces (one day we'll have to talk about the abuse of this term), often people with little cinematic culture from whom you hear, "you could tell from the trailer that it was going to be a masterpiece" (I swear, heard it the other day in Rome shortly after the screening). And so, since the film mostly disappointed me given what the expectations were, I decided to dive back into dear old Debaser.

I would say to start with what works in the movie, and to do so, we have to bring up one of the (other) now overused words in cinematic language, which is "immersive." You can say anything about Eggers’ latest film except that it isn't a work capable of immersing you in its atmosphere, which envelops and bewitches with a persistent and obsessively captivating soundscape and manages to lay itself onto a cinematography capable of reviving, albeit on the big screen, those worlds that seem so distant from today. The visual impact is generally remarkable, but maybe one day Eggers will tell us why those desaturations in some nighttime scenes jar so terribly with the pursuit of realism both in the outdoor scenes and in the (rare) indoor scenes.

Another note of merit concerns the historical reconstruction: we had already seen it in The Vvitch and The Lighthouse, and here we see it reconfirmed. Eggers, as stated in several interviews, loves to go to the original sources, do archival work (something that, as a history graduate, I can't help but appreciate), and give his films the highest level of verisimilitude one can bring to the big screen. In The Northman, the filmmaker does the same great historical/philological work, starting from the Amleth of medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus to elaborate the Norse imagination: in the movie, the references to traditions (songs and dances), myths, and religion (the countless references to gods and pagan-shamanic ritual practices) are blatant and numerous and, except for what is already a famous scene (belching and farting), also of considerable charm.

If the film is undeniably capable of capturing the viewer in its atmospheres and in the world it manages mostly to reconstruct (it must be said, Eggers does not create but re-creates something that takes full hands from Refn's Valhalla Rising to Conan the Barbarian and so forth), the problem emerges when Eggers has to narrate. The screenplay was written with Icelandic writer Sjón, but what becomes clear right from the start is that it has very little room to maneuver: after the first 15 minutes, the viewer already knows they will have to wait for the last 10 for a final resolution as awaited as it is predictable. In between, there is a banal story, we can even say it, in which a series of "stages" follow one another that seem to be the "quests" of a themed video game: the meeting with the shamanic-appearance Bjork (not a little didactic), finding the magic sword (naturally after a boss fight), the game that allows one to rise from slave status (a sort of Norse quidditch), and then the various revenges up to the final resolution. There’s not too much concern for originality in cinema in 2022, but it’s impossible not to notice how Eggers’ characters (a limitation already emerged in the nonetheless more successful The Lighthouse) are often automatons devoid of real psychological depth and filmic substance: in this case, they act almost by fatal inertia, dominated by divine forces that have already revealed and imposed (after all, you can’t escape your destiny). Sure, the discourse on human fallibility and blind and destructive belief in superstition is interesting (this too, a theme already widely emerged in Eggers' two previous films), but if in The Vvitch this expressive and thrilling tension was created with the writing of the characters, in The Northman it is totally nullified by the preponderance attributed to the divine element: human beings are subordinate cogs of another, intangible system. They just act. Even when a half-twist is attempted, it gets canceled after a few minutes. In this, is there Eggers' poetics or also (and above all) the need to trivialize the discourse and the story to reach a wider audience with a work that ultimately cost 90 million dollars? The doubt will remain Hamletian. Just as there's hope that that final duel, so 300-like and so little Eggers-like, is not the product of the director himself but of production impositions (it's reported that the film was cut by half an hour and widely revised by the producers’ will).

I know, I've already gone on too long, but there’s one last aspect of the film that deserves at least to be mentioned: Eggers is a director with a remarkable hand, and it was already evident in his previous two works. However, what re-emerges (for this writer, already present in The Lighthouse) is a certain directorial exhibitionism that moves outside the dynamics of the story. I'll explain: Eggers often opts for very complex camera movements (here moving long takes abound), even when they wouldn’t be necessary and especially appear forced and detached from the story. One example among many, but others could be given (and I understand that we're in nitpicking, but the trained eye notices these things): at the beginning of one of the acts into which the film is divided, we see a fixed shot of a river. Then a boat enters from the left, and the camera makes a sharp forward movement, then rises, then lowers to land on the boat, then starts a slow forward movement to finally veer right and arrive at a close-up of our gigantic Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård): it's 40 seconds in which the viewer is subjected to a directorial choice of ostentation poorly integrated with the story. As if Eggers, beyond certain quick judgments about his short career, is still searching for the construction of his cinema, the balance between image creation (and their functionality) and storytelling dynamics.

There would be many other things to say: from the potentially very interesting role of Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy) immediately subordinated to the protagonist's love object, to the choice of having actors speak with a chewed and differing English, from the surprisingly good acting performance of Claes Bang in the role of Fjölnir (the best in the cast), to the rather poor rendering of the special effects. But better to steer clear of Odin’s judgment. So, I’ll remain silent.