Nicole Kidman praises the extraordinary worldbuilding in The Northman. Robert Eggers draws on Scandinavian folklore for his latest film, an epic based on the same story that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The film stars Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth, a young prince on a quest for revenge after the murder of his father and the abduction of his mother.
Eggers of course began building his reputation for delving into dark folklore on his first film The Witch. An interest in the darker nooks and crannies of human psychology also showed itself on Eggers’ debut feature, and continued into his second film The Lighthouse, starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. Eggers has now expanded his worldbuilding efforts on his third film The Northman, a conjuring of the distant past whose creation was such a daunting experience that lead actor Skarsgård confessed to becoming exhausted. Skarsgård’s co-star Anya Taylor-Joy on the other hand said she enjoyed spending her time in the freezing cold and mud for the sake of Eggers’ vision.
Ultimately Skarsgård and Taylor-Joy both in their own ways expressed admiration for Eggers’ commitment to bringing The Northman to life with as much rigorous realism as possible. And now their co-star Kidman has added her own voice to the chorus of Northman praise. At the movie’s premiere, Kidman (who plays Skarsgård’s mother Queen Gudrún) remarked upon the film’s worldbuilding and how much work Eggers put into bringing the distant past to such vivid life (via Reuters):
It was extraordinary. The way Rob Eggers created this whole world. And it was really like stepping back into reality. The village. The research. All of the work that he put into it. And hopefully you can feel that jumping off the screen. It’s a crazy ride. And it’s violent but it’s Vikings.
Indeed the violence and brutality of The Northman are readily evident in the movie’s trailers, which promise an experience that’s less Shakespeare and more Conan the Barbarian. One recent clip even prepared audiences for the unlikely sight of Skarsgård’s Amleth swordfighting on top of an active volcano, an image that might seem more at home in a pure fantasy story like Game of Thrones. But though The Northman may in some ways be steeped in far-out folkloric fantasy, it’s obvious that Eggers went to great lengths to also evoke the genuine blood and sweat of life during the age of the Vikings.
Kidman for her part was clearly impressed by Eggers’ efforts to bring the past to life not just for his actors but for audiences witnessing The Northman in theaters. And Focus Features clearly hopes that the promise of brutal Viking spectacle will draw plenty of people to those theaters, as the film reportedly cost $90 million to make and has been backed with an undoubtedly expensive full-on marketing push. The presence of stars like Kidman of course is meant to add to the movie’s appeal, but it remains to be seen if its combination of realistically-rendered Viking wrath, big-name stars and epic volcano battles is enough to push The Northman to box office glory.
Source: Reuters/Twitter
