Should have been even longer with less gore: The Northman reviewed

In Rus, which we now call Ukraine, Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard) begins his pursuit of revenge. A sea captain who later aids him is called Volodymyr. But these incidentals have no relevance to the current war, except in one aspect that I want to come on to.

Though the film’s hero is called Amleth, the original of Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet, you can forget Elsinore. The director Robert Eggers’s world in The Northman is that of the Norse sagas, of corpse-eating ravens, runes, mud, gore, human sacrifice and sudden violence. One of the runes on the title cards between scenes is named after the word for ‘ulcer’. The sun never shines. It is surprising that, in their wet homespuns, everyone isn’t shivering.

Occasionally we glimpse spectacular, soggy Icelandic scenery, but two hours are principally cheered by a succession of slittings, maimings and disembowellings that often made me hide behind my notebook.

Don’t tell anyone, but Tolkien would have been interested in this film. I doubt he’d have liked the art nouveau Elvish artefacts in Peter Jackson’s films of his own myths. Where Jackson used cartoon shorthand for violence, Eggers likes to show a nose being cut off.

Amleth even ends, like The Lord of the Rings, on a volcano like Mount Doom, doom being the Old Norse domr, the ‘law of irrevocable destiny’ that dogs Amleth. He finds he can’t cut the threads of fate spun by the Norns, those implacable immortal women.

This being a Norse saga, the place of women is limited, though the performance of Björk as a seer with three eyes is a delight. But even the dirtiest-faced Viking had a mummy, and in Iceland Amleth eventually finds himself in Gertrude’s closet, I mean the bedroom of his mother Queen Gudrun (Nicole Kidman), now married to the uncle (whose name I didn’t catch but began with an ‘F’ and sounded as though it had an umlaut somewhere, played by Claes Bang), who killed his father.