“In the land of blind men, the one-eyed man is king,” goes the old proverb. That seems to be the case in this story of a bestial Viking slave whose survival skills see him through the numerous obstacles of a menacing, primitive world. Directed by Denmark’s Nicolas Winding Refn, who made a name for himself with his Pusher series, this is an odd bit of cinema which is hard to classify into a genre.
Don’t let yourself be fooled into thinking this is an action-filled hack-and-slash film about Vikings constantly at war. It’s not. This is a rather contemplative film, filled with hallucinatory images and long stretches of Ingmar Bergman-like scenes consisting of silent musings on mortality and religious faith. There are fight scenes, to be sure, and they are quite brutal. But these fights are few and far between. This isn’t Beowulf.
To say the film moves slowly and deliberately would be an understatement. The movie creeps along at a glacial pace, the camera hovering lovingly on images in an almost indolent manner. Filmed in Scotland, the cinematography is excellent, capturing the feeling of lonely isolation and primal beauty. The story is broken into four chapters, each one focusing on a different phase of the character’s journey.
The story takes place after the Viking’s devastating defeat at the battle of Stamford Bridge, and the death of former Viking leader Henry Harota. The once mighty Vikings were in decline. They were being hunted down (In what was called the Baltic Crusades) and Christianity was spreading, replacing the belief in Odin and the old Gods the Viking worshiped. Christian crusaders were exterminating the once feared Scandinavian warriors, while many Vikings were converting to the Christian religion and turning against their former fellow warriors. The last of the Vikings were under siege.
Our main character is a savage Viking slave known only as One-Eye (Mads Mikkelsen, best known to American audiences as Le Chiffre in Casino Royale) used by his Viking Master Barde (Alexander Morton, best known as Golly in the British TV series Monarch of the Glen) as a gladiator in cruel life-and-death battles which are the equivalent of human cock fighting. One-Eye is described as having “come up from Hell”, and he fights like it. One-Eye wins money for Barde, which the clever Viking Chief uses to appease the Christians hunting him.
One day the opportunity for escape arrives and One-Eye turns on his captors, gaining his freedom. He flees along with another slave; a young boy named Are (Maarten Stevenson), who is the only person ever to show One-Eye a modicum of decency. As they travel together, Are becomes the voice for the silent One-Eye, who is either mute or simply unwilling to speak a word. One-Eye becomes Are’s protector, creating a strange, symbiotic relationship between the two.
One-Eye becomes similar to Clint Eastwood’s character in Sergio Leone’s "The-man-with-no-name" trilogy, or the wandering, nameless Samurai of Kurasawa’s Yojimbo, trekking across the countryside and looking menacing, with no real destination in mind. He begins to have trippy visions, all of which are rendered in an eerie blood-red hue. What are these visions trying to tell him? The escaped slaves come across of group of converted former Vikings who are now on a sacred crusade to reach the Holy Land in Palestine. The Christian crew ask One-Eye to join them, thinking his formidable battle prowess would be of inestimable help during their pilgrimage.
There is an interminably lengthy sequence in a longship, lost in the fog, where the passengers fear they are cursed and that One-Eye’s presence has caused them to take a wrong turn into hell. It’s a tense sequence but it goes on far too long. When the fog clears, our crusaders realize that they did indeed make a wrong turn but it wasn’t into Hell. It was the same wrong turn Columbus made, and they find themselves in a green new world which is too new yet to be called the New World.
At this point, the film becomes strongly reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s classic Aguirre: The Wrath of God, with the voyagers suffering from increasing insanity, due to their isolation and alienation from each other. And covert assaults by the unseen indigenous population don’t help matters.
“Valhalla” in Scandinavian mythology is where the old Gods go after death. This film takes place at a time when Viking culture was dying out, as were their beliefs. One-Eye is a metaphor for Odin, the one-eyed warrior king of Asgard who suffered on Earth to attain enlightenment (hanging Christ-like pinned to a tree) and returns to the heavens to lead his people. Late in Valhalla Rising, the remaining crusaders begin to follow One-Eye, feeling that he knows something they don’t. Does he, or is he just going insane?
Valhalla Rising may be too slow and for action film lovers and too gory for people expecting a cerebral art-house film. It’s definitely hard to characterize and won’t be a big financial hit but it is a unique bit of experimental cinema.
"Valhalla Rising" opens July 14, 2010 and is not rated. Foreign. Written and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. Starring Alexander Morton, Maarten Stevenson, Mads Mikkelsen.
