J.L. F.

Ooph, that was so much worse than I was hoping for. Either that, or it was comedy gold. I can't tell because I kept bursting into laughter at all the non sequiturs, the poor editing choices, and the ill-constructed story threads. (A protagonist can be illogical, a story can be loaded with magical realism, but the writers better know what's what, and Eggers and Sjón seemed, to me, to be utterly lost.) More than anything I guffawed at every over-the-top screen moment of grunting, shouting, man-thumping, all of which I was, I suppose, supposed to take seriously. No spoilers (though there's little to spoil here), but what The Northman gave us was a picture-perfect portrayal of toxic masculinity, of emotional non-intelligence, and of everything a father-to-be should never, ever do. Sjón is a national treasure of Iceland. Eggers's The Lighthouse was an arthouse marvel. His The VVitch was a work of genius. The Northman? Wow, what a flop of groaning but-not-grown-up man-meat passing as a "film." I hope the artists got what they wanted out of this, but wow... not the best work of these two creatives.

A lot of people are going to hate this movie, because it's going to subvert their expectations and completely snub their overpriced Hollywood addictions. The Green Knight is bad summer blockbuster material, but it would have been excellent November arthouse material. It draws straight from the mythology, takes the same pace as we might expect if we were reduced to walking miles across the landscape of the Dark Ages, and it refuses to make any blunt statements about good or evil. It doesn't want us to turn off our brains; it wants us to feel how an unproven Knight of the Round Table might really have felt, in his heart day by day, and this it does. I freakin' loved this film. It's been awhile since I saw anything that so entirely exploded the trite big-studio formulas and gave me something to think about, to drive me back into legends, and to think about humans rather than two-dimensional comic-book heroes. Based on the the public reviews—people either love this film or hate it—I'd say A24's only mistake here was in their marketing and their choice of release date.