Unfortunately, I thought this was another major step down for Eggers, whose narrative features,
just like his shorts, seem to be getting worse with each outing. The film is not without merit- it's impressive on a technical level (of course) and Eggers gets to engage in no-holds-barred brutality within a conventional framework of
Amleth's oft-replicated revenge drama (reports of a "mainstream"
Valhalla Rising aren't entirely misguided, even if that is a bit of a tersely packaged summary). Eggers' obsessive approach to delineating modules of folklore is more expansively projected but holds less weight than his previous two works, as the formerly well-researched, scripted dialects have (necessarily) been mostly diluted down to English, and the epic-scale of this madness washes many of his careful idiosyncrasies out whilst retaining a familiarity in structure that's only intermittently engaging.
This is an unfair charge perhaps (we're talking about the basis for
Hamlet here, nobody should be expecting novelty in narrative propulsion), but it's worth noting in comparison to his previous two films, which at least kept you guessing from scene to scene and obfuscated predictability; and in removing this attribute, Eggers as an insulated artist is revealed to be less eclectically impressive than he is with the support of unique narrative devices. The louder detailing is welcome to boost the bare involvement on a narrative level, but eccentricity in atmosphere doesn't compensate for a lack of eccentricity in character, story, or audio-visual experimental inserts (there are some fantastical sequences, but they feel out of place rather than part of the fabric of the film's world). Revenge can be motivating, so part of its failure can be sourced to Skarsgård coming off as an empty vessel, which makes the revenge a shrugging investment, and the peripheral superficial features the real spectacle worth attending to... Though it's the vacuous script and how distracted Eggers becomes with the exteriors that I suspect detract from a core of substance, a root cause of priorities in construction. The textures are expressed well but inundated by unearned, bombastic quests for catharsis. Any critiques of this society are lost on me- Eggers is so clearly in love with the worlds he returns to via art, and while I doubt he wants to literally go back to live as a viking, I find his compulsive interests to overshadow a potential to assess these cultures by a metric of basic complexity, when he struggles to gain distance from the material he adores.
Only Kidman really worked for me here, in her third act reveal that evades the trap of an otherwise head-slapping contrivance with a seething, showstopping performance that sells this as internally-earned drama, regardless of how many times we've seen an incarnation of this scene before. I just wish the whole film operated even remotely close to this wavelength. Instead it's mostly repetition dressed up in impressive garbs by a filmmaker who admitted during a Q&A I attended for
The Lighthouse that he's far more interested in folklore than filmmaking, stated in a manner that almost completely disregarded cinema as a stones-throw secondary passion. Unfortunately, here, it shows, and not for the benefit of the film.