The Northman - 4K Blu-ray (Collector’s Edition)

I watched The Northman in October. It was my first time watching it. It’s a well made, intriguing film.

The 4K disk looks great. According to an interview with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke the film was shot mostly using a Panavision 35mm Millennium XL2 on Kodak Vision3 35mm film, although other cameras and versions of the film stock were used as well for specific shots. The transfer was mastered at 2160p, or standard 4K resolution. I mention this because it’s so clean visually that initially I wondered if it was digitally shot.

Visually speaking this film is so rich. The natural wilderness environment of locations in Northern Ireland and Iceland, the sea, and village life, set design, costuming, and makeup, etc, are all captured with a kind of stark intensity. The sound mixing seems excellent. (I listened via AirPods.)

To add a layer of context to my reaction: over the last few years I had accumulated a pile of blu rays, most of them 4K, with the majority being movies I just hadn’t gotten to yet, and also a few that I intended to rewatch. While my wife was away in October on a church trip I watched one movie per evening. I mention all this because I ran through a cluster of them that prominently feature violence, cruelty, and even outright savagery and brutality. This was the fourth film in a row where that was the case, namely, Kingdom of Heaven, The Revenant, Atomic Blonde, and now The Northman.

We all know that American cinema glorifies violence. Portraying violence creatively in film has become an art form almost in its own right. And I’ve always been a fan—mainly because it’s escapist fantasy. But that recent run of films that go so hard and graphic with the violence kind of wore me out!

In any event, the Northman is all about savagery. The story it has to tell is actually interesting though, I would say. The film did make me care about the protagonist, a Viking prince named Amleth who swears an oath to avenge his father’s murder. And I grew to care about his mate as well, a peasant sorceress. I was rooting for them.

The human relationships in the story are given a fair degree of depth and complexity. But that being said, the society of the ancient Vikings is organized around the primitive animalistic instinct to manipulate, control and dominate others. And to that end violence is used without compunction in the cruelest of ways. In this film that savage drive energy is utterly relentless. It is condensed into the protagonist’s quest for revenge, of course. But maybe that in turn symbolizes the beating heart to that violent drive energy of the entire culture, to its collective psyche.

One nuance I appreciated, though, is that their shamanic and spiritual practices and beliefs, and the ancient Norse mythology, seem to essentially be a way of attempting to harness and direct that violence. For example, the Vikings created a belief system that their warriors go to paradise in the afterlife if they die in nobly battle—which of course serves to rationalize, to justify, early death from that warring lifestyle.

An interesting theme in all of this is that the two women in the hero’s life, his mother and his bride, while obviously subjugated as women are also like puppet masters to the men. They too display a fierceness to achieve their goals. But they use psychological manipulation to wield power instead of brute physical strength.

I want to believe that the human species is working through the problem of finding a way to maintain shared social existence without violence somehow living at the core of it. To eventually evolve past that. That we can become intelligent and mature enough to do that. Perhaps the fact that we’re so heavily obsessed with violence in this most powerful of shared art forms, cinema, reflects that.

At the end of the story Amleth has an opportunity to walk away from the cycle of revenge to start a new life for himself with Olga. But he can’t. From the vantage of modern day western humanism this story is essentially a tragedy. The way we look at things today, the hero, Amleth, is so brainwashed by his culture, so conditioned to bloodlust, and so hellbent on revenge that he is unable to establish a life truly for himself as his own person, fully embracing his freedom to choose who he will be outside of what his society dictates. In Jungian terms it can be argued that he doesn’t individuate. And that is because he has no sense of a choice existing for him. Not really. He’s a slave to his culture.

On the other hand, from the perspective of his own native culture and that time in history Amleth dies a noble, glorious and honorable death. And thereby he fulfills his destiny. He’s all about that. Individuating wasn’t a thing, I guess. And that may be a bit difficult for us to relate in our present day worldview. I appreciate that director Robert Eggers leaves us with that open-ended contradiction.