Amleth is not the hook that drew me into this story, though. The archetype I’m here for is his father, King Aurvandill, also known as Ørvendil or, in Anglo Saxon, as Ēarendel, a name that will immediately grab the attention of any Tolkien fan. 

Almost none of this has any bearing on The Northman as a film. I bring it up merely to point out that there’s something resonant and archetypal about this story. There’s a reason it keeps getting told and retold, that its central characters inspire entirely different legendaria, that we’re drawn to it like flame, despite knowing that flame burns. 

And perhaps the best thing I can say about this stupefying work of cinema is that Eggers seems to get that. In crafting his own version of this well-trod tale of revenge—while attempting to return to Saxo as much as possible without erasing the impact and importance of future adaptations such as Shakespeare’s—the director/co-writer seems to understand that to truly convey why the impulses and emotions central to this story are so destructive, we must explore why they’re so seductive. 

It’s a neat trick to be able to pull that off without venturing too close to glorifying bloodshed at one extreme or moralizing from a modern perspective on the other, but Eggers and co-writer Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson (aka Sjón, aka Johnny Triumph of The Sugarcubes) have found a nice middle ground here largely by taking a show-don’t-tell approach to the storytelling. 

What they’re showing, though, is so utterly and delightfully weird that I can’t begin to imagine what the pitch meetings with the studio heads at Regency Enterprises must have been like. In one sense, you can’t help but get the impression The Northman is Eggers’ way of countering a lot of the ahistorical nonsense of The History Channel’s popular TV series Vikings. You can see onscreen the obsession with historically accurate (or at least not laughably inaccurate) attire, architecture, even hairstyles. Few meaningful liberties are taken with the material world in which the film is set.

On the other hand, not all of the film takes place in the realm of the material, or at least it seems not to. There’s an acknowledgement that so much of this story is based on legend, not real historical figures, and there also seems to be a concerted effort to incorporate the spiritual beliefs of the peoples portrayed as accurately and evocatively as possible. Passages of the film straddle the line between acid trip and fever dream, and it’s not always clear whether the fantastical elements are intended to be viewed as the dreams and visions of the characters or the actual reality of the story being told. Sometimes the distinction is evident, but not always. 

Perhaps what makes it difficult to tell at times whether we’re seeing the world as it supposedly is or purely as the characters imagine it is because The Northman is simultaneously one of the most theatrical films I’ve seen in ages and also one of the most cinematic. Those competing aesthetics create a sense of tension that permeates the work throughout. 

Sometimes the Dolby Atmos soundtrack comes off like something I would have heard while working at my local Shakespeare Festival, and others times it almost seems to be trying to recreate reality. At other times still, it goes places only a modern movie sound mix can go. In many instances, the UHD HDR10 transfer—taken from a 4K intermediate, itself taken from a Super 35 negative framed at 2:1—looks like a work of cinema from the 1980s, with backdrops that appear to be matte paintings and nocturnal exteriors that appear to have been shot day-for-night despite the fact that they weren’t. At other times, the cinematography by Jarin Blaschke looks as naturalistic and un-stylized as possible for a film shot on Kodak stock.

What I’m trying to convey is that The Northman isn’t a sort of straightforward blockbuster-looking movie. It’s a bit weird and organic and grungy and filmic. Blacks aren’t always rock-solid black, and often (though far from always) the finest of details are obscured by filters and fog and smoke and fine film grain. But it’s all so beautiful to behold, even if it’s not quite what most videophiles would consider home-cinema demo material. There’s so much texture to the image that it brings the environments and the people that inhabit them to life wonderfully. HDR doesn’t do much here except enhance shadow detail, but that hardly matters since the UHD resolution unlocks nuances in the imagery I have to imagine would be lost in HD.

And you could say much the same about the Atmos mix. It’s not interested in keeping the knob dialed to 11 on every speaker in your room. It’s ostentatious when it needs to be, and quiet when it needs to be. It may not be the title you cue up to show off your sound system, but it’s one that requires a well-engineered system to appreciate, given how dynamic it is. Just for kicks, I decided to watch some of the film through my TV’s built-in speakers and found it to be incomprehensible. 

As for the much-ballyhooed bloodshed—it may just be that this aspect of the film was all anyone wanted to discuss when it first debuted in cinemas, but I found the violence to be far less gruesome than it could have been, much less so than expected, at any rate. Only two or three shots could be legitimately accused of being gratuitous, and I think I would be on the defensive side of that debate. 

More often than not, the worst violence or gore happens just offscreen, or just a few fractions of a second after the scene cuts away. The carnage is more implicit than explicit—which is not to say that it isn’t felt. It surely is. But it never ventures into the exploitative territory of something like, say, the original RoboCop or the more recent Bone Tomahawk. 

If my thoughts here seem a bit scattershot, that’s a fair criticism. I’m still trying to sort out exactly what I think and feel about The Northman, although I’m aching to watch it again—not necessarily for the story, since it’s one we all know by heart, but rather the cinematography, the symbolism, the performances, the set design, the costumes, the score, the sound mix . . .  the sheer experience of it all. 

It’s a bummer the Kaleidescape release lacks so many of the bonus goodies found on the UHD Blu-ray—including an audio commentary, roughly 40 minutes’ worth of featurettes exploring the historical context of the film and its shooting locations, and deleted scenes—but such is the case for Universal releases on Kaleidescape. In the online domain, these supplements seem to be Apple exclusives.

Even without the bonus goodies, though, The Northman is a must-own if you think you can endure the occasional abstractions, the sometime stream-of-consciousness storytelling, and the infrequent sword to the face. I went into it thinking I knew what kind of film it would be and uncertain of whether I would like it. I came out the other side ever-so-slightly obsessed with this deliciously strange slice of cinema.