Spoiler Warning: The Northman (2022)
With summer quickly approaching, 2022’s The Northman, directed by the fascinating folkloric filmmaker Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse), served as a stark reminder of the harsh and bitter cold season. The film follows Viking warrior prince Amleth, portrayed by a particularly bedraggled yet somehow still dashing Alexander Skarsgard (True Blood, The Legend of Tarzan), as he mounts a lifelong campaign to avenge his father, Ethan Hawke’s (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Moon Knight) chiseled cut-throat King Aurvandill War-Raven, save his mother, Nicole Kidman’s (Batman Forever, Eyes Wide Shut) cunning Queen Gudrun, and kill Claes Bang’s (The Affair, Dracula) Fjolnir, Amleth’s treacherous uncle who murdered King Aurvandill. These are tasks that Amleth fulfills to varying degrees of success.
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The Northman boasts an impressive cast. Those not yet mentioned include Willem Dafoe (Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Spider-Man: No Way Home), in his turn as the bawdy and boisterous fool Heimir, and Icelandic music sensation Bjork as Seeress. However, no actor stole the hearts of The Northman’s audiences more than the highly in-demand and always captivating Anya Taylor-Joy (Peaky Blinders, The Queen’s Gambit) in her role as Slavic sorceress Olga.
Brains Over Brawn
In a film as gory and garish as The Northman, any brief respite from the ravenous revenging of Amleth was warmly welcomed by audiences. Anya Taylor-Joy’s Olga, a wily witch wielding her wit rather than tempered steel, provides that respite and more. Viewers watched the unassuming Taylor-Joy’s Olga employ an intellect with a capacity for lethality that rivaled even the most muscle-bound northerners in the film.
As Olga explains to Skarsgard’s Amleth, “Your strength breaks men’s bones. I have the cunning to break their minds.” In a manner similar to the ostracization caused by Olga’s fair skin and white hair, her intellect sets her at odds with her surroundings and earns her no favor with her captors. Audiences cannot help but feel more sympathy for Anya Taylor-Joy’s Olga, who has survived in opposition to the brutal status quo on cunning alone, than Skargard’s Amleth, whose physical attributes and blind rage have kept him on a straight path of destruction through the cold North.
Wily Witchcraft
Though The Northman delves into the supernatural from time to time, Anya Taylor-Joy’s Slavic sorceress Olga, despite being billed as a conjurer, doesn’t employ spells; instead, she opts for serums. In a climactic scene, Olga mixes psychedelic mushrooms into the camp’s dinnertime stew. Why was a character largely understood to be a Slavic sorceress tasked with feeding an entire camp’s worth of her captors, one might ask. Regardless, the shrooms do their thing, and the resultant chaos allows Amleth to further his revenge plot against Fjolnir.
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In The Northman and in the Viking, warrior-centric culture, physical attributes are king. The women who are most highly valued throughout the film are traditionally beautiful, and every man of note has a torso studded with a seemingly impossible number of abs. If Anya Taylor Joy’s Olga, though of her own admission a Slavic sorceress, was shown to have a genuine capacity for supernatural summoning, the ways in which she weaponizes ‘witchcraft’ would be markedly less impressive. Skarsgard hacking through legions of Fjolnir’s lackies is one thing. Olga using the intellect she earned through a hard-scrabble life to harvest poisonous mushrooms from the Icelandic countryside – that is heroism.
A Hopeful Heroine
The Northman is both literally and figuratively dark. That was to be expected; the violent exploits of a revenge-fueled Viking and the barren countrysides of Scandinavia and Iceland are similarly dark. However, at the film’s conclusion, audiences are left with a certain semblance of hope, albeit one tainted by the overwhelming spectacle of violence they were just witness to.
As Amleth lays dying, struck down by the traitorous and newly headless Fjolnir, he is granted a glimpse of Anya Taylor-Joy’s Olga, holding their two young twins in her arms, children audiences only recently learned of and who they knew were the genesis of Almeth’s final, fatal return to Iceland. In the overwhelming darkness of The Northman, audiences must have been relieved to see some light that was not coming from an active lava flow, or the flames of a pillager’s torch.
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It’s difficult to say which was longer – the heads of hair on this film’s unkempt Vikings, or The Northman’s list of celebrity talent. Made to act alongside a cadre of proven actors, Anya Taylor-Joy rises to the occasion and then some, combining tenderness and ferocity into a masterful performance that matches the film’s brooding intensity. Anya Taylor-Joy is a joy in The Northman and in the slew of other projects she’s currently involved with. Olga, the Slavic sorceress, was the film’s scintillating surprise standout.
