The | Northman

Have you seen The Northman ? Did you think it was a masterpiece or an over-indulgent mess? Let me know in the comments below. Just don’t mention the horned helmets.

Robert Eggers, the madman who brought us the suffocating dread of The Witch and the hallucinatory madness of The Lighthouse , has done the unthinkable. He has taken a $90 million budget, a cast full of A-listers, and a story as old as time (literally Hamlet , which borrowed from the same Norse legend), and turned it into a brutal, psychedelic, howling-at-the-moon revenge saga. The Northman

Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) watches his father, King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke), get butchered by his uncle, Fjölnir (Claes Bang). He flees, vowing to avenge his father, save his mother (Nicole Kidman), and kill his uncle. Standard stuff, right? Have you seen The Northman

This is not a movie you simply watch . This is a movie you survive . Just don’t mention the horned helmets

The violence is... biblical. Swords don't cling . They squelch . Axes don't slash; they disembowel. There is a sequence near the end involving a volcano, a pile of skulls, and two naked, mud-covered men that is so primal it feels like you’re watching a cave painting come to life.

Let’s be honest: When you hear “Viking movie,” your brain probably goes straight to horned helmets, cheesy accents, and Kirk Douglas singing in a 1958 Technicolor epic. Or, more recently, the hyper-stylized, political drama of Vikings on the History Channel.