The Best Movies of the Year: Magic, Psychedelia, and Psychosis in The Northman

Amleth’s romance with Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), the beautiful Slavic captive from the destroyed village, leads to a vengeance partnership, influenced by her own utility with earthen magic. When they first met, she said she had the cunning to break men’s minds; as they plan to begin Fjölnir’s nightmare, Olga puts a mushroom in Amleth’s hand, foretelling the use of a traditional and tangible brand of witchcraft: Poison. Later, when they’re on a boat to leave the kingdom, memory of prophecy—and a magical vision of his father’s heart-ancestry tree assuring him that Olga is carrying his children—draws Amleth back to his revenge. (He’s a bit of a dolt, as his venom-spewing, truth-telling mother mentioned some scenes earlier.) In response, Olga demonstrates further magic for the ship’s crew and the audience. Mourning the future she might have had with the man she’d come to love, she calls the ocean breeze to move her ship along. She chants in anguish what sounds like a curse and raises her arms. Winds fill the sails.

Amleth dies on a volcano, at “The Gates of Hel,” surrounded by a “lake of fire,” fulfilling all that had been foretold. He has a naked swordfight on a volcano with his uncle after killing his mother and his youngest half-brother in a combination of self-defense and accident (and promising, faithfully, that they will all meet again in the halls of the Allfather). This is the mother he’d come all this way to save, and a brother he’d saved not long before. The fight on the volcano is a dark and dramatic spectacle, an engaging vision of grief, brutality and the folly of vengeance.

In the end, Amleth is carried to Valhalla on the back of a Valkyrie’s flying steed. Is this the fantasy of a dying man leaving the world, or the mythical culmination of a physical and spiritual adventure? It’s both. It is the intentional ambiguity of putting the real and surreal, or natural and supernatural, on equivalent planes in a piece of modern media which mostly considers itself ordered according to post-Enlightenment ideals of logic and reason. While the studio investing nearly $100 million certainly would have liked global resonance, this was a film made by an American director facing an American audience within a culture that has the ability to subsume and calcify even as it diversifies. This can limit audience interpretation of even the most explicit or intentional artistic statements. Our society is not without spiritualism—Christianity is everywhere, other religions are prevalent if not as prominent, and animistic traditions from here and across the world live on—and we’re also not without magical thinking. Any manner of public discourse around issues of economy, geopolitics or climate change will readily reveal that.

Rather, though, these things are usually displayed to us as disparate, rather than intersecting or interlocking, places of existence. While it’s not without surprise or revelation, The Northman’s plot is relatively straightforward. Yet we—or I—have gotten so used to a dichotomy where speculation in film is increasingly the purview of comic book movies on one hand and, on the other, the use of the supernatural is otherwise frequently a play on psychology. In The Northman, we can feel the literary heritage of Shakespeare: It feels like an earnest interpretation of the Dark Ages, translated to our time, made by someone who lives in our time, trying to relate to how people thought and felt then. It’s so basic yet feels so profound.

The fantasy of The Northman is taking old myths, old religious belief systems, and having thier expressions on the material, real-feeling world come across clearly, but in hidden, lonely moments with few witnesses for the characters. The questions of whether magic is real, whether the gods are real, whether prophecy and fate are real, never occur to the characters as they do the audience. In part, we’re informed by Eggers’ use of visual metaphor to illustrate themes while questioning the sanity of a protagonist. But the characters know it all to be true. Their faith in their gods and in the connection between nature and the supernatural guide them along paths to destruction and salvation. That these things happen obscured in darkness, in the wee hours, or after imbibing and chanting, doesn’t make them less real but more—the ritual begets the experience, death invites the enchantress, her prophecy reveals a path ending in a ride to Valhalla.

Kevin Fox, Jr. is a freelance writer with an MA in history, who loves videogames, film, TV, and sports, and dreams of liberation. He can be found on Twitter @kevinfoxjr.