There Is a World Elsewhere
I was invited to an advance screening of The Northman not as a movie reviewer but in my capacity as a member of a university History department. This makes sense given that, arguably, no other active filmmaker takes the the past as seriously, and as much on its own peculiar terms, as does Robert Eggers.
Yet, in The Witch, The Lighthouse, and now The Northman, Eggers is rigorously committed not only to the standard checklist of "period accuracy" production-design components, he is also singularly focused on getting inside the thought-worlds and proprioceptive experiences of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a remote nautical outpost in the 1890s, and the visceral landscape of early medieval northern Europe, specifically from the perspective of pre-Christianized Vikings – though, true to period, this modern term is never used (digressing here: anachronistic name notwithstanding, if you happen to be in the Montréal area, this serendipitously timed special exhibition is a must!).
These are immersive visions of (more or less) alien milieux, equal parts awesomely beautiful and awesomely terrifying. And Eggers' films betray remarkably little interest in the concerns, debates, and assumptions of current culture, except insofar as Eggers-the-craftsman-of-spectacles seems to know intuitively how to entrance and thrill modern audiences as well as any contemporary director. The perspectives of these three films and their encoding of meaning belong as far as possible –– Eggers would make a very good professional historian –– to the distant moments in time and space they make palpable and immediate. The Northman's narrative rhythms, its moral tone and internal logic, its eerie beauty and ghoulish grotesquerie all derive from the world of the Icelandic Eddas and of Beowulf, although there are also unmistakable (pre-)echoes of Shakespeare, with the primordial ooze that would much later coalesce into the Hamlet and (to a lesser extent) Macbeth stories mixed in with the mud and blood and bile on screen.
Given an obviously larger budget, a wider canvas on which to create, and a terrific cast of movie stars (including, best of all here, the one of Eggers' own partial making), Eggers compromises or tones down none of his esoteric or idiosyncratic artistic impulses; he delivers his most impressive film yet. As a cinephile, I'd say it's a masterpiece, and also that it's extremely unlikely to be surpassed by any Hollywood release – or film, period? – this year. As an historian of the Early Middle Ages, I wonder if it might be the best, and the most indelibly evocative, movie set in that period – a time before the knights and castles and codes of chivalry that have attracted far more cinematic attention than this stranger, liminal lost epoch separating the High Middle Ages from Roman Late Antiquity.
