NORTHMANThe Northman To begin with, not too many movies these days feature dialogue in Old Norse and “chapter’ headings in Runic letters, so The Northman initially deserves some special attention, if merely as a curio. My knowledge of ancient languages is limited to Latin and Anglo-Saxon, so the Old Norse of The Northman, to make a bad joke and mix a metaphor, is Greek to me. On the other hand, in a movie where characters hiss, howl, bark, scream, and whisper most of the dialogue, the subtitles for Old Norse, paradoxically, provide most of the clearest and most comprehensible speech in the film. Beyond linguistics, the movie also shows what appears to be an accurate picture of the Vikings, whose power spread all over Northern Europe for something like three centuries, embarking on amphibious landings in the British Isles, conquering an impressive amount of territory. As one would expect, they do a great deal of their traditional raping and pillaging, a Viking specialty, and demonstrate further cruelty when they pack a crowd of their victims into a kind of oversized thatched hut, then burn it down. Most of the plot revolves around their enslaving a number of their captives, who are set to work rowing the long ships, building structures, and suffering. Allegedly and very vaguely a kind of Ur-Hamlet, the film shows a very different protagonist from Shakespeare’s hesitant, indecisive, introspective hero, here named Amlith (Alexander Skarsgård), who also suffers the murder of his father and the betrayal of his mother (Nicole Kidman). After a Viking raid destroys his town and murders most of its inhabitants, he decides to allow himself to be enslaved so he can wreak revenge on his captors and his betrayers. That revenge perfectly suits the general bloodiness of the movie, resulting in a multitude of stabbings, slashings, decapitations, and a quite graphic evisceration, pretty much something for every taste. The general picture of life under Viking conquest in the ninth century seems quite authentic—violent, dirty, dangerous, and generally most uncomfortable, nicely foreshadowing Hobbes’s famous dark judgment of human life as nasty, brutish, and short. It also includes a good deal of puzzlingly extreme behavior, as when characters don wolf and bear skins, growl and shout before attacking, proclaiming that they are the animals whose fur they wear. In another strange scene early in the movie, young Amlith and his father strip naked, crawl in some sort of cave, and drink blood under the direction of a shaman played by Willem Dafoe in his best high hysterical mode. That bizarre and essentially pointless exaggeration, accompanied by its usual screams, grunts, and howls, sums up the general tone of the work. Oddly, for a work grounded in a bleak reality, the movie ends in something like pure myth. With all the action and conflict, however, there is rarely a dull moment in The Northman, but there are a great many unpleasant ones.