You’ve certainly never seen a Hamlet quite like this before. To a backdrop of volcanoes spewing their applause, heads roll liberally in The Northman, several tumbling from big-name actors who’ve been enticed, understandably, by the film’s wild take on Viking mythology, its unabashed epic scale. It roars and grunts, lunges and spurts. 

It’s a huge leap up in canvas size for Robert Eggers, whose previous films The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019) were made on a fraction of this $90m budget. With his co-writer Sjón, an Icelandic poet-novelist, Eggers has taken the legend of Amleth, the warrior prince whose revenge inspired Shakespeare, and fashioned a film of savage, unruly beauty.

Corpses are crushed into mud or dangle like sadistic wall art. In nude moments of respite, hot springs wash off the crusted gore of foes. At no point does a rampant Alexander Skarsgård, in the lead role, look tempted to break off for any soul-searching soliloquies, that’s for sure. 

Assumed dead by his uncle Fjölnir (a hirsute Claes Bang), Amleth has motives of both revenge and rescue exploding inside his skull. After watching his father, King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke), slaughtered when he was a mere boy, he saw his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), carried off screaming.

Eggers handles these triggering events in a first act that manages to be both efficient and tellingly bonkers. As a kind of Yorick of the longhall, Heimir the Fool (Willem Dafoe) is introduced waggling his bits. Bonding between father and son occurs in a grotto, with both on all fours howling like rabid dogs.