Review of Valhalla Rising (2009) by Ryan B — 13 May 2013

If "Valhalla Rising" were any more minimal than it would have consisted of an hour and thirty minutes of celluloid that had been shot in an abandoned missile silo without any form of lighting during a solar eclipse. Too much?

Nicholas Winding Refn, the auteur extraordinaire who allows his actors to wear more emotion on their faces during every painstakingly-taut dramatic pause than any director this side of the Atlantic Ocean has crafted the Nordic version of "Wendy and Lucy;" although in this case "Valhalla Rising" was a call to how base, how endemically perverse our mien is as the human race brutalizes one-another in the name of its arbitrary traditions.

Mads Mikkelsen, the one-eyed, tribally-tattooed mute killing machine isn't your fathers protagonist; He isn't John Wayne with a trusty six-shooter or Clint Eastwood with a Magnum and a catch-phrase, all Mads has at his disposal is his blood-stained hunting ax and a laconic disposition that never allows the viewer to empathize with his character. What the viewer is is a voyeur into a world that feels like a millennia removed from our collective conscience, yet is set roughly around the time of King Richard the Lionhearted. Mads, referred to as "One-Eye" by his young companion and fellow globe-trotter, spends much of the film staring: staring into a fog which happens to span all of the Atlantic ocean. Staring at the hillsides which are his home for half-a-decade while he is taken as a prisoner and forced to compete in Gladiatorial combat. But mostly he is staring into the blue horizon, into a sea of tranquility that is void of the barbarism that he is forced into (however willingly he seems to initiate it.).

The film, such like its protagonist, holds us at just the right arms-length to feel as though we're safe from the horrors of a culture we'll never have to live through, and from a man that we're all to lucky to have psychologically evolved.