I have been a fan of Robert Eggers’ filmmaking ever since I saw “The Witch” at Sundance more than 6 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 just a few months ago. It stars Nicole Kidman, Alexander Skarsgård, Anya Taylor-Joy, Bill Skarsgård, and Willem Dafoe. A test screening occurred last week at a Dallas movie theatre. A brave thespian who attended the 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.”
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.
Of course, we all know the rule: take these reactions with a grain of salt rather than treating them as gospel. Still, I will say that the film tested like gangbusters earlier this year, and Lionsgate clearly has confidence.