The Northman

I think this might have been my first Robert Eggers film, despite the relatively high regard my friends and film folk seem to hold him in. And I have to say, I get it.

Ironically, it was Patrick Tomasso's video essay on The Parent Trap that gave me the language I needed to appreciate this film on a visual level. I've been a fan of HDR since I first learned what HDR is (or was), but it was Tomasso's essay highlighting lighting, contrast, shadow, and pure blacks that radicalized me. That made me switch from LCD to OLED. That made me dislike most modern Disney films for not using real spaces with real lights and real shadows.

Eggers takes inky shadows and exponentially increases them. I had a hunch that he did, but for some reason (probably just being a rather obstinate person), I'd avoid his films despite most of them being available on one of the myriad streaming apps I already pay for.

I expected this to be a revenge action movie, heavy on the violence. Akin to The Revenant, but Norse. I didn't expect it to play coy with what was real or not along the lines of religion, nor did I expect the recontextualization of the revenge arc at the end of the second act so that unreality is laid like a mask on morality when there's any history of violence. Granted, there was a massive clue towards that in the early moments of the film (the line about killing his uncle), but I had watered down my expectations prior to starting the film.

Those expectations were shattered and by the end I found myself rooting against the ostensible protagonist.