Yes, trust is its own treasure – and their gold-digging partnership promises a sequel.
For the most part it’s an enthralling immersion in a forbidding time and place, enhanced by an immoderately attractive cast and saddled only b...
New Yorker April 22, 2022 Instead of the roots of Shakespeare’s play, "The Northman" merely serves up its raw material both half-baked and overcooked.
Eggers recreated, with obsessive accuracy, the world of the medievals in order to lower us into a myth that feels primordial and strange, as i...
New Yorker April 15, 2022 "The Northman" is at once overwhelming and curiously uninvolving.
Toronto Star April 22, 2022 A payback tale for the ages.
Blood runs, mud flies and bones crack – in crisp, percussive ways you’ve hopefully never heard in real life – throughout The Northman, a...
The Atlantic April 21, 2022 Eggers indulges both the grand folklore of the Viking age and the commonplace reality that shaped it, successfully creating an odyssey that feels g...
Detroit News April 21, 2022 "The Northman" feels like the culmination of Eggers' powers as a writer and director, taking his knack for creating moody atmosphere and...
Radio Times April 11, 2022 All hail an egg-head whose non-macho masterpiece is hopefully about to set the world on fire.
NOW Toronto April 22, 2022 The Northman envelopes its conventional swords-and-sandals plot with a vibe and aesthetic that is both unhinged and seductive.
Globe and Mail April 19, 2022 A guttural, primal grunt of a movie that is all raging testosterone and incendiary machismo. And I loved nearly every minute of it.
"The Northman" is both a dazzling display of film craft and a sly retooling of genre, a movie that delights in fulfilling certain convent...
RogerEbert.com April 11, 2022 Eggers brand of psychological shock is bolder here than his prior works and potent in bursts, but barely works on boldness alone.
It feels compromised, but the great stuff outweighs the not-so-great stuff. To see or not to see? If that is the question, the answer is: see it.
The Northman is an extravagant and unshackled cinematic experience with a vibe akin to a rock opera performed at the foot of an active volcano.
The Ringer April 22, 2022 The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman all reflect their director’s penchant for exacting attention to detail and hard-earned madness.
Independent April 11, 2022 I call upon Odin: may The Northman make a billion dollars.
Chicago Reader April 28, 2022 What you’ll get is neither the bold weirdness of Eggers’s previous efforts in the critically-acclaimed margins nor a clean strike into the blo...
New York Times April 21, 2022 What’s perhaps most impressive about "The Northman" is that it hurtles through 136 minutes of musclebound, shaggy-maned mayhem witho...
It’s ultimately rather dull and hardly any fun…
Robert Eggers’ The Northman is an extraordinary feat of cinema – but it’s also a bloody, mournful, violent tale of vengeance that is never sim...
Eggers makes "The Northman" as crafty as an art film, as brutal as a slasher flick – two-plus hours of arthouse savagery.
If meant to be a provocative meditation on freewill and revenge, and a bloody, visceral, painstakingly-detailed spectacle it maybe only d...
Genuinely thrilling from start to finish.
Rolling Stone April 21, 2022 The Northman, Robert Eggers’ biggest and most expansive (and expensive) feature to date, is also his best so far.
Slant Magazine April 11, 2022 While the canvas of Robert Eggers latest is considerably broader than that of The Witch and the Lighthouse, it feels as if its psychological chaos...
The Guardian April 17, 2022 It’s as ambitious as it is preposterous and, at times, ponderous – filled with garbled epithets about vengeance and fate that are whispered, mutter...
Eggers’ immersive approach and stylistic flair creates one wild, applause-worthy combat scene after another, reminding viewers why he’s one of the...
Through it all, Egger pulls excellent performances from his cast, maintains a steady forceful tone and drives the storylines to a cataclysmic...
Eggers fans, and the cinematically curious, who will come away dazed, and sometimes dazzled.
Vanity Fair April 21, 2022 Eggers’s action sequences are swift and brutal, filled with the crunch of life extinguished and tossed into the bone pile of time. Skarsgård, hulki...
Times (UK) April 11, 2022 A one-note fiasco and a foam-flecked depiction of cartoon machismo from a gifted film-maker who should have known better.
A tumultuous, graphically gorgeous entertainment for our time as well as an ineffably somber meditation on our species’ seemingly inexhaustible res...
As we get to summer with a lot of polished blockbusters, this is something a bit grittier, and a bit more interesting.
Daily Telegraph April 11, 2022 Rumours of recuts and difficult testing haven’t reduced its essence: like Skarsgård’s brawny frame, it stands more than tall enough at 137 min...
Irish Times April 11, 2022 A few centuries of exposure to the formal theatrical tragedies have prepared us for the storys inevitable narrative arcs. But the richness of Egger...
This movie is so visceral you can feel it reverberating inside your body, which is exactly what makes it so delightful.
theplaylist.net April 11, 2022 A staggering feat of visceral filmmaking, The Northman, like Eggers' previous films, warrants profound analysis while still delivering a high...
TIME Magazine April 22, 2022 The Northman, whether you approach it as legitimate folklore or as a testosterone-fueled Saturday-afternoon lark, speaks to the 10-year-old bo...
Financial Times April 13, 2022 Eggers treats the big screen reverently, like the last one he will ever get to make a film for.
Chicago Tribune April 21, 2022 "The Northman" fills out its widescreen canvas, carefully and meticulously.
It’s an impressive piece of time travel. Eggers succeeds in conjuring up a world governed exclusively by blood feuds and territorial imperativ...
Beneath the runes and visions, it’s a tale as old as Game of Thrones, and as simple as a story told around a campfire: a ride of th...
Boston Globe April 26, 2022 It certainly feels authentic – there’s a sense of constant otherness to what we experience on the screen, yet with no sense of contrivanc...
You can almost taste the sweat and the salt and and the fire, grounding the experience in the tangible, but hovering just on the edge of every fram...
In a movie era that’s been defined by compromise, The Northman rides into theaters with the fury of a valkyrie – it’s the rare studi...
The best kind of multi-quadrant movie: Without abandoning his arthouse credentials, Eggers has made a rousingly rough, extreme action saga tha...
Eggers commitment to maintaining period accuracy and influences makes for a visual feast but binds it narratively. The mesmerizing style and m...
Working for the first time with a blockbuster-scaled budget, Eggers can give full range to his feverishly inventive imagination, and the resul...
For the first time, it feels like Eggers is relying on pagan pageant more than psychology to drive the movie, and the result is a seance that...
A death-metal ode to honor, retribution and sacrifice that casts payback in a surprisingly, and thrillingly, positive light.
The Australian April 29, 2022 Despite the lavish treatment, the film is surprisingly dreary. Though there is a plot twist in the later stages, it doesn’t compensate for the...
Robert Eggers delivers big yet again. The entire ensemble sizzles in this ferocious revenge tale that envelopes you in the 10th Century and ensures...
"Northman" is relentlessly brutal, but the violence feels appropriate for a world in which there aren’t any rules and where "social ...
The Guardian April 11, 2022 It’s entirely outrageous, with some epic visions of the flaring cosmos. I couldn’t look away.
The Northman is gripping cinema of the sort that we get too little of today, when too often a director’s vision is diluted by box office imper...
Director/co-writer Robert Eggers has sought to make the definitive Viking movie, and while the film issues a guttural cry for theatrical viewi...
MovieFreak.com April 22, 2022 A sensory triumph more than it is an emotional one, this is nonetheless an enthralling endeavor, everything building to a crushing finale of s...
Its revenge-odyssey narrative operates along such a primal wavelength one could easily imagine Eggers discovering it inscribed on a cave wall.
The Northman doesn’t so much adopt the plot of Hamlet as dig beneath it to unearth the ur-story that predates Shakespeare by centuries. So wh...
A work of bold imagination, not another offshoot of a familiar IP. That alone deserves respect.
"The Northman" is authentic atavistic cinema, a bulletin from the before times fashioned by one of the great natural filmmakers of the present.
It holds our attention with unforgettable visuals and the sheer, raw audacity of its premise.
A delightfully offbeat epic. No guts, no glory!
The mood, the detail and the look of this production is extraordinary. And the fiery showdown at the end is incomparable.
Its most notable quality is the way it refuses to bend its characters to the present, preferring instead to make them as alien in their perspective...
Empire Magazine April 12, 2022 This is intimate, culturally rich storytelling on a brutally epic scale.
Although the film ends up as a shallow rumination on revenge and single-minded dominance, it’s hard to beat as spectacle. In terms of making h...
Times (UK) August 8, 2022 Not since Christopher Nolan’s Inception has a studio executive shown such balls of steel, or perhaps I should say boller av stal.
Eggers’s execution feels hollow, capturing the horror but undercutting the heart. So in the end, the blows while intense and gory don’t...
The Ringer April 22, 2022 The Northman is a lot of things—bruising, rousing, and often entertaining—but it’s not particularly complex.
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