We have a trailer for Robert Eggers’ “The Northman.” It looks … expensive, a very bloody Viking adaptation of “Hamlet.”
I have been a fan of Eggers’ filmmaking ever since I saw “The Witch” at Sundance more than 7 years ago. He’s the real deal, even if I thought “The Lighthouse,” a decently watchable film, was a tad beneath his skills as a filmmaker.
“The Northman,” Eggers’ upcoming third film, finished production is early 2021. It stars Nicole Kidman, Alexander Skarsgård, Anya Taylor-Joy, Bill Skarsgård, and Willem Dafoe.
A few test screenings have happened around the country already. A brave thespian who attended a Texas screening decided to conduct an AMA on Reddit.
Here are a few noteworthy quotes:
“I was extremely impressedwith it. There’s a lot of brutal action and violence, and it overall had a very authentic Norse feel to it. It is a revenge tale slash Viking epic. I’d place it right above The Witch and just below The Lighthouse.”
“As Queen Gudrun, Nicole Kidman was great also. Anya Taylor-Joy does give a [distinctive] performance but the movie isn’t about her as much as Skarsgard’s character but she delivers a [solid] supporting performance and she’s in one of my favorite scenes of the movie. Bjork plays a somewhat pivotal role [i.e., ‘Slav witch’], but only has one scene — lasts about five minutes.”
“Jarin Blaschke‘s cinematography is stellar. Most of the lighting seemed to be from natural light sources. They said the color grading was still in progress. One or two scenes were in black and white, plus a lot blues, greens, greys, dark shadows. A few VFX shots that were pretty damn great and even a bit trippy at times.”
“More accessible than The Green Knight, The Lighthouse or The Witch. It’s basically a revenge/avenge tale and also probably like a lot of Viking legends out there, but the story was so well told. I thought the pacing was actually quite tight — there weren’t really any scenes I would trim or take out. I wish I could’ve understood certain bits of dialogue a bit better. Bjork’s scene is all whispers so it was hard to make out what she was saying but all in all it was pretty epic, pretty dark, very intense.”
“I personally liked The Lighthouse a bit more, but this one was a lot more thrilling and action-driven. Definitely an easy watch if you like intense action thriller, edge of your seat, battle/adventure movies, but it’s soaked in so much gorgeous filmmaking, perfect framing, perfect camera pans, perfect wide shots of beautiful mountains, hills and volcanoes…great, terrific, exceptional stuff all around.”
“The Northman probably still be my favorite movie of 2022 by the time we get to the end of that year, if I’m being honest. It runs 140 minutes. A hard R rating awaits.”
I had also posted three reactions from a California screening that happened earlier in the Spring:
Reaction #1
The Northman is..... a work in progress. PAINFULLY SLOW...... THAT SAID, the first 2 acts are pretty damn solid. Act 3 is pretty abysmal, overlong, and inconsistent with the previous 2 acts. Skarsgaard is great. Kidman doesn’t come prominent until the last half. Dafoe is only in it for 2 scenes but the time he does have in it is fantastic. It’s a 2hr 45 min big budget Valhalla Rising essentially. April makes total sense....... this is not an awards movie. They have enough time to re-edit the latter 45 min. A good movie is in there. Just needs to be found. Bjork is in 2 scenes. yodels and sings in her native language. that’s it. not even exaggerating.
Reaction #2:
I was also part of the focus group and it was pretty mixed (equal amounts of the excellent/very good/good scores), mostly due to people not fully understanding the mythological aspects or the fact that there wasn’t enough romance to make you care about Skarsgard. A few people were calling him one-note because of it
Reaction #3
I liked it, which was surprising because gory period films like these aren’t normally my thing. Without getting too much into it (and there’s a lot to get into because it’s 2 and a half hours), the story is basically The Revenant with The Lighthouse type dialogue and has a lot of Norse mythology references sprinkled throughout. Felt very “gotta google this to see what it means” at times. It’s mainly Skarsgard’s show but Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicole Kidman were scene-stealers IMO. I was also expecting it to feel more ensemble-y than it ended up being, which is kind of a shame. Björk was a cameo, while Dafoe and Hawke have pretty limited screentime
What we seem to have here is an ambitious and massive film with a reported $110 million budget. The screenplay was co-written by Icelandic novelist and poet Sjón Sigurdsson. Expect ambiguously spooky storytelling.
The film is set to open on April 8th, 2022.
The short version: "Woman Unknown" was a compromise. The jury deadlocked over "Possible Love" and "NAZA," not able to com to terms, fell back on their #3, May el-Toukhy's film.