The Northman. MA15+, 137 minutes. Four stars.
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As Nicole Kidman says in her AMC cinemas ad the kids are loving to parody on TikTok, somehow heartbreak feels good in a place like this.
For Old Nic, here playing Queen Gudrun, that place is ancient Iceland and the heartbreak is the impending death of her husband King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke).
He has returned from a pillaging trip with a brutal stomach wound and the desire to pass the royal mantle to their son Amleth (played as a young man by Oscar Novak).
This epic historical film is the third work from the luminescent American director Robert Eggers, of black and white arthouse weirdness The Lighthouse.
It's a take on the Hamlet story, the original one that Shakespeare ripped off.
Eggers' screenplay, penned with Icelandic author Sjon, is less introspective palace wordplay riposting and more visceral and stabby.
This is not a wordy play-within-a-play, but a linear and violently efficient narrative.
As young Amleth watches, Aurvandill is slain by his uncle Fjolnir (Claes Bang) and his mother kidnapped.
Amleth escapes to the sea, chanting to himself as he rows to safety the mantra, "I will revenge you father, I will save you mother, I will kill you Fjolnir."
Years later, Amleth (now played by Alexander Skarsgard) has joined the berserkers, a Viking killing machine, biding his time to one day enact his planned revenge.
That day begins when a seer (Bjork) gives him a vision of the sword that will assist in his success.
Branding himself as a slave, he stows away on a slave trader vessel destined for the village uncle Fjolnir now lords over and is befriended by feisty sorceress slave Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy).
Here Amleth begins a slow revenge, one played out in a brutal and blood-soaked fashion.
What a film this is.
The attention to detail in its historical authenticity, its costuming, its staging, its set construction, is staggering.
Eggers embraces the filth, the mud, the moss, the viscera that were part and parcel of the day.
Staggering is also what many of the characters do after they have been hacked into parts by the enormous Skarsgard.
He's already played a northman of sorts, the vampire Eric Northman on True Blood.
He has, I'm guessing, spent most of the years since at the gym, because he is believably berserker with a swollen musculature.
With it he gives a very physical performance.
Very physical also describes Eggers' approach to his direction.
There are a dozen or so big action sequences, and they are balletic and brutal.
Eggers embraces the filth, the mud, the moss, the viscera that were part and parcel of the day.
He inventively offers the visions, religious fervour and mushroom-induced fever dreams his characters experience.
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There's an element of supernatural horror to the film, which is something Eggers did so well in his debut film The Witch that introduced Anya Taylor-Joy to the world.
His production team construct a violent sporting match played with paddles.
It feels like the evil origins of hockey, but also not that far from the violence of that sport's present-day incarnation.
Kidman is a cold and efficient queen.
She sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Taylor-Joy's earth-mother witchy lover for Amleth.
Danish actor Bang is a match for Skarsgard in the physicality of his performance.
Rumbling away underneath all that mud is the score from Robin Carolina and Sebastian Gainsborough.
It's reminiscent not of stage-bound Shakespeare but of the ever-present shaking of the volcano Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland.
