SKARSGARD: (As Amleth) I cannot escape my fate. And that makes all of this play more authentically than you might expect and more fantastically, too, in ways that have everything to do with big-screen showmanship. MONDELLO: Eggers has researched 10th-century Nordic life as few filmmakers before him, the way spirits and drug-fueled visions were accepted as part of the real world, the trance-like fury of berserker warriors. 'The Northman' has hundreds of marauding warriors, Nicole Kidman as a supremely devious queen and Bjork haunting the rugged slopes of Iceland as a blind seeress.īJORK: (As Seeress) Even though your brother stole my eyes, I see you. MONDELLO: The director's visuals are also designed to haunt, including a fight to the death atop an erupting volcano, all in the service of a story far grander than his last film, the intimate black and white 'The Lighthouse,' which had just two men in a cramped interior. SKARSGARD: (As Amleth) For now I will haunt this farm like a hungry corpse returned from the grave. Director Robert Eggers makes 'The Northman' a waking cinematic nightmare - mayhem filmed in breathtaking continuous shots, emotions pitched on the far side of sanity, supernatural elements as real to the characters as breathing. To sleep, perchance to dream might well be worse. TAYLOR-JOY: (As Olga of the Birch Forest) Then you must wake up. As echoes of Shakespeare pile up and Willem Dafoe's unlucky jester even gets a Yorick's skull moment, Olga centers Amleth, keeps him focused. MONDELLO: If this be madness, yet there is method in't. He wears the head of a wolf and is animalistic, whether knocking heads together or hooking up with Olga, the film's witchy but practical Ophelia figure.ĪNYA TAYLOR-JOY: (As Olga of the Birch Forest) Your strength breaks men's bones. Played by Alexander Skarsgard, Amleth is a bull of a man, neck bulging as he catches a spear in midair that's just missed his head and hurls it back at defenders of a town he's about to sack. MONDELLO: Because what's a guy to do when there's something rotten in the pre-state of Denmark. He grows up a man of action, of serious muscles and of few, if oft repeated, words.ĪLEXANDER SKARSGARD: (As Amleth) I will avenge you, Father. The movie's prince, by contrast, isn't much worried about being or not being. He also gave the Prince Hamlet existential doubts and soliloquies about shuffling off this mortal coil.

MONDELLO: When Shakespeare adapted this same legend about a Scandinavian prince whose uncle kills his father and marries his mother, he took the H at the end of Amleth and put it at the front. OSCAR: (As Young Amleth) I will avenge you, Father. MONDELLO: As Amleth runs away, he makes a vow. HAWKE: (As King Aurvandil War-Raven) Strike, brother, strike but know that bearing a stolen ring makes no half-breed a king. As little Amleth catches snowflakes on his tongue, an arrow whizzes by, lodging itself in the king's chest and an unroyal uncle approaches, sword drawn.

Duplicate annihilator vs photosweeper