“The Northman”: when the Vikings of Robert Eggers divide the critics of the “Mask”

After “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse”, Robert Eggers delves into Scandinavian legend to adapt “Hamlet”. A story of revenge whose universe and spectacular staging convinced some of the critics of the “Mask”, while the other points to a visual and script collapse.

Actor Alexander Skarsgård as Amlet in ‘The Northman’ © 2022 FOCUS FEATURES

The film presented by Jérôme Garcin

A 2h15 film, which takes place in the 900s. A Viking prince seeks to avenge the death of his father killed by his uncle when he was a child. You may have recognized ‘Hamlet’, which inspired Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, with the very very bodybuilder Alexander Skarsgard as Hamlet, Nicole Kidman as his mother, Queen Gudrun, Ethan Hawk the murdered king , Willem Dafoe, and even singer Björk.

If you like grandiloquent, fighting, sorcery, gore, savagery, you will be in heaven. Otherwise…

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Sophie Avon did not hide her pleasure!

If the Viking epics are absolutely not Sophie’s cup of tea as a rule, she admits to having been touched by the cinematic and narrative power of the film, even if it is very testosterone.

SV: “Usually I don’t like these kinds of films at all. I went there reluctantly, but unexpectedly I was taken in because there are real cinematic power, real beautysomething animal, wild, radical, certainly loaded with hemoglobin with this overexposed virility but which embarks.

There are narrative power to which I was sensitive. Less for all things magic, fantasy. After that, it was singularly lacking in poetry, it was kitschissime, which cooled me down a bit“.

This is a radical film, but spectacular!

Pierre Murat let himself be convinced by “a universe that is nevertheless singular”

The critic of “Télérama” did not remain insensitive to the original atmosphere that the staging managed to create. If you didn’t like his previous film, this one will certainly convince you better.

PM: “I really went there reluctantly after seeing “The Lighthouse” which was of a rare and absolute pretension. There too, it is, but curiously, even if there is everything to displease me there has two or three absolutely fabulous moments– including a formidable sequence shot where the bodybuilt hero invades the Slavic camp, which offers a shot of several minutes with extras in every corner and which gives to see a real force of staging. Then the confrontation with Nicole Kidman, when Hamlet and his mother send insults and curses of impressive force.

A bloated staging, but which creates a very singular universe, so after all, why not”

For Camille Nevers, “it’s a form of auteur blockbuster”

For the critics of “Liberation”, it’s like very bad theatre, like a silent film that makes aesthetics speak in order to be heard better, but which, in addition, offers ineffective shots compensated by a steroid effect…

CN: “It could make one think of silent cinema now recycled into a posing art formwhich can only give those horrible Nirvana clips that we saw in the 1990s with filters or like the art cultural blockbuster in silent film.

We are in Hamlet before Shakespeare, before the language of the theater and after “Game of Thrones”, with plans that are very interesting.

It is a very steroid movie of an artist who thinks he is a great actor, with things you see everywhere”.

It’s like a silent film that has forgotten that cinema has become talking

For Jean-Marc Lalanne, it’s a visual and screenplay collapse

While he was going there with a certain appetite as he loves the Hollywood spectacular, the “Inrocks” journalist was disappointed and deplores a total absence of staging and a film cradled by a species, this virile fantasy which is transformed more than something else in cinematic stupidity.

JM L: “I find that disgusting and very painful. I really liked his first film “The Witch”, hence the extremely precise, rigorous staging with a sense of off-camera suggestion that suggested that this guy was really going to make great films with great means. But there, it’s a real collapse… He is totally crushed by the film he wants to make…

Beyond the slightly heavy metal aesthetic, there is really no staging…

The handling of digital effects is hideous. I’m thinking of the final battle which offers a riot of awful lighting effects. A film of incredible stupidityin particular this kind of virile fantasy and revenge that are refuted by the film itself.

The film absolutely does not go to the end of its claim to deconstruct the myth of virility

The film

🎧 Listen to all the reviews exchanged about the film on the set of Mask & the Feather:

“The Northman” by Robert Eggers

By Jerome Garcin

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“The Northman”: when the Vikings of Robert Eggers divide the critics of the “Mask”


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