Grand and Violent, ‘The Man in the North’ is the Viking revenge epic blockbuster cinema needed | #CineBuzzIndica

When Robert Eggers made his film debut in 2015, with “A Bruxa”, many praised the director – well deserved -, putting on his shoulders the burden of being one of the names that would change contemporary horror. With that, expectations were created for his next work, satisfied in 2019, when “O Farol” was released. And if the feature starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe is not seen as terror by some, it is undeniable that Eggers was inspired by the German Expressionism of the 1920s to conceive many of the story’s ideas.

Having only these two films in his filmography so far, it was difficult to identify a style in Robert Eggers. It was clear that horror remained one of his biggest inspirations – if not the biggest -, but there was still a lack of clarity on which side of such a vast genre. Eggers would walk. For example, James Wan always flirted with extreme horror in the “Saw” franchise and with a more modern decoupage in the “Conjuring” franchise; Jordan Peele, from “Run!” and “We”, uses terror as a tool to imbue a strong racial discourse in his films; and Ari Asterfrom “Hereditary” and “Midsommar”, appeals to the discomfort and repulsion in narratives that start from family dilemmas.

Doubt about style Eggers it’s genuine and far from a criticism of the director, it’s made because it got even bigger when the movie world learned that his next project would be a viking epic with extreme violence. Now, where would the director get inspiration from horror to direct a story like this? And they exist, in fact, in “The Man from the North”, the third film by the director that brings together some names he has worked with before, such as Anya Taylor-Joyfrom “The Witch”, and Willem Dafoefrom “O Farol”, in addition to news such as Alexander Skarsgard (“Melancholy”), Nicole Kidman (“Dogville”), Claes Bang (“The Square”), Ethan Hawke (“Moon Knight”), among others.

There was also another doubt that always arises when a director used to more independent cinema takes on a project as grandiose as “The Man in the North”: dealing with producers and a budget he had not worked with until then. For comparison, the epic Viking had a budget of 90 million dollars, while “The Witch” cost 4 million and “The Lighthouse” 11 million. And more: as it is a studio project, naturally, Eggers he would have less creative control – and he actually complained about the traumatic experience that the production of the film had been. How then Eggers would you handle all this? The answer is on the big screen.

It is noticeable that “O Homem do Norte” is a blockbuster – the style that today’s cinema needs – because it brings together several aspects that make up a film that wants to take the audience to the cinemas: The dialogues are expository – and sometimes even too didactic -, the decoupage is more classic and less inventive, and the story has a climax that we wait for from the first minutes of projection. Still, it exposes violence and naked, bloodstained bodies that, if not justify the 18-year-old rating – honestly, an exaggeration – at least makes it clear that it’s possible to make movies for adults inside a big movie studio.

In the plot, Prince Amleth (Skarsgard) is about to become a man when his father, King Aurvandil (Hawke), is brutally murdered by his uncle Fjölnir (bang), who also kidnaps the boy’s mother, Gudrún (Kidman). Two decades later, Amleth became a Viking with a mission: to kill his uncle, save his mother and avenge his father.

The classic hero’s journey of “The Man in the North” is naturally easier to be digested by the public because revenge stories like “Hamlet” and “The Lion King” already inhabit our imagination, and it will be no mistake if any viewer compares ” The Northman” to them, however, Eggers is inspired by the Danish tale of Amleth, which inspired Williams Shakespeare to write the play “Hamlet”, to conduct his blockbuster for a style closer to yours.

Even if the limitations of a studio film prevent certain daydreams seen in “The Lighthouse” or a darker aura like that of “The Witch”, Eggers manages to impregnate with blood, violence and dirt several passages of a film that would go wrong in looser hands. Your camera walks next to Amleth from Skarsgard – gigantically muscular -, always angry, dirty as an animal and with the poignant look of someone who only knows the thirst for revenge and who will be satisfied with it as soon as he finds it.

The long-shots and photography of Jarin Blaschkea constant contributor to Eggersgive “The Northern Man” something that cinema blockbuster lacks nowadays: more authenticity and personality. Although it is told in a classic way, the film finds in passages such as the Valkyrie riding towards the sky or the fight between two naked men next to a river of lava, an effervescence that only a director like Eggers could present. It is noted in moments like those mentioned that the director tried, at all costs, to get rid of the shackles of a studio film.

Of course, “The Man in the North” is not the film that will define the style Robert Eggers, perhaps this project works much more as a personal challenge that the director himself wanted to go through than anything else. To the viewer, at least one thing will become clear after the film session: Eggers is a filmmaker attached to the classic with a strong aesthetic sense that, even within all the limiting circumstances of making a studio film, going through an extremely exhausting process, still manages to make us curious about a mere Viking revenge story.