#411: valhalla rising
surreal, violent, and short on dialogue? must be a nicolas winding refn film.
valhalla rising (2009, d. nicolas winding refn): there is a lot of mud in valhalla rising, a lot of fog. conversely, not a lot of dialogue. add moments of sudden, intense violence and you’ve got your typical nicolas winding refn film, with a heaping helping of surrealism.
mads mikkelsen is one-eye, a mute, brutalized fighting slave somewhere in scandinavian scotland. within minutes, we see his fighting skills on full, bloody display, and in the absence of any dialogue from him, this is the perhaps the core feature of his character. he wins every fight handily, often in seconds, but it doesn’t protect him from regular abuse from his handlers. the only person who’s nice to him is a young boy also held as a slave, and when one-eye slaughters the chieftain and his men and escapes, he lets the young boy follow, protecting him from the christian vikings they meet up with. with nowhere else to go, they join the vikings (who are mildly afraid of one-eye) on a poorly-planned trip to the holy land, but wind up never making it — instead, their boat is beset by fog, and after several days they find themselves in north america, surrounded by wild, untamed land — and the local inuit who call it home.
there isn’t a single pleasant place, or a single moment of any real peace, to be found in this film. shot entirely outdoors, one-eye and his young charge are mistreated and suspected by successive groups of brutish, violent men, wide-bodied and thick-handed, most of whom find themselves on the receiving end of sudden violence, usually from one-eye, who does not tolerate threats towards himself or his young sidekick (who does the talking for him when necessary.)
the only moments of real beauty are the nature shots; refn makes it clear that his characters exist in a kind of beautiful void, vast and empty. other than primitive cage one-eye is kept in, the only thing resembling a structure is the boat that makes up the middle part of the film. characters are otherwise ground into the dirt, or left to sink in dark waters, their bodies left for nature to claim. it’s hard not to start nodding along as the would-be crusaders wonder if they might not literally have gone to hell, especially when their leader starts ranting about conquering the locals and creating a new jerusalem. the hellish undertones are emphasized by one-eye’s red-tinged visions, surreal glimpses of the future that aren’t any less surreal when they come true, most especially the final moments of the film.
one-eye himself embodies the core of the film: violent and short on words, with a deeper meaning beneath. refn’s film isn’t just a pretentious art piece; while each chapter of the film (explicitly numbered and named) is essentially iterative of the last, there’s a core point that refn is trying to make about cruelty, extremism, and kindness.
this as well as casino royale were the films that put mikkelsen on the map; they couldn’t be more different from each other, but it is valhalla rising that really gives mikkelsen a chance to show off his acting chops, speaking entirely though his body language. somehow, he makes it work.
valhalla rising is kind of obscure now, but if you can withstand the intense violence (which includes decapitation, disembowelment, and dashing someone’s brains out with a rock) you’re in for a 90-minute mood piece that tries to say as much as it can by saying very little. whether that works or not is a little foggy.
