Review of Valhalla Rising (2009) by Frankie R — 09 Jul 2013

This is one of the best films that everyone will hate I've seen in a while. Despite the fact that it's about Vikings and the poster makes it look a bit like an action movie, this is one of the bleakest and most un-crowd-pleasing movies I've seen in a long time. The things it called to mind for me were Peter Brook's 1971 King Lear film, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, the works of Andrei Tarkovsky, and Terrence Malick having a nightmare. It's a very pointed attempt to make a different sort of historical movie than we're used to seeing, and I think it works very well.

The minimalist story follows a silent fighter named One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen), who escapes from his masters and, accompanied by a boy who speaks for him, joins a group of Christian Vikings who think they are heading to Jerusalem, though they end up in North America. That's about all the plot there is. The movie would have worked just as well as a silent film - the main character never speaks one word, and the other characters probably have 50 lines of dialogue altogether.

I should make it clear, this is not an entertaining movie, and it makes no attempt to be. It makes even fewer concessions to audience expectations or convention than would Nicolas Winding Refn's next movie, Drive. As I said, it's an attempt to make an unconventional historical movie. Many historical films, even the best of them, tend to feel like historical textbooks being brought to life. They also tend to situate themselves in grand narratives. Take Spielberg's recent Lincoln, for example. It's an excellent movie, but it's also a very traditional take on a well-known historical person and momentous events, and it fits into a grand American narrative of emancipation and progress. These films tend to situate the audience as learners who will benefit from the lessons of the narrative.

This movie doesn't do any of that. It is a brutal film about brutal people leading dirty, painful lives. The film offers no contextualization - we're not even sure what country we're in at the beginning, and while we can figure out that the characters have traveled to North America in the second half of the film, they have no idea where they are. We in the audience don't have any more information or perspective than the characters do, and that's not a lot. These characters are not important people, either, though one of them imagines himself to be. Their mission to "protect God's land" is meaningless and absurd, and does nothing good for any of them. They're all filthy all the time. More than almost any other movie I can think of, this movie does not tell you history so much as it does just drop you directly into it. The cinematography is beautiful sometimes, but that's small comfort to the characters. I can't tell you you'll enjoy this movie, because you probably won't. But it does offer a more immediate and obviously artsy take on the historical film, and I admired it.