Vikings unleash hell in the first trail­er for Robert Eggers’ The Northman

Robert Eggers is wind­ing the clock back fur­ther than ever before. The ris­ing genre film­mak­er has made a name for him­self with slav­ish­ly detailed recre­ations of New Eng­land in the 1890s (on The Light­house) and cir­ca the sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry era known as the First Peri­od (for The Witch), but for his third fea­ture, he’s tak­ing leave of his cor­ner of Amer­i­ca and going medieval.

10^th-cen­tu­ry Ice­land sets the scene for The North­man, the first trail­er for which appeared online just this morn­ing. Eggers has brought his skills with peri­od pro­duc­tion design, his fas­ci­na­tion with char­ac­ters pushed to the precipice of san­i­ty, and his curios­i­ty about long-past cul­ture to what appears to be the biggest, most ambi­tious project of his career to date.

The fit­ting­ly Scan­di­na­vian Alexan­der Skars­gård leads the cast as Amleth, a Viking set on the path of revenge when his father Hor­vendill (Ethan Hawke) is mur­dered by the cad Fjöl­nir (Claes Bang) in his boy­hood years. The adult Amleth pledges him­self to a three-tenet lifestyle – avenge his father, save his moth­er Gudrun (Nicole Kid­man), and kill Fjöl­nir – and sets out on a grand and per­ilous odyssey to ful­fill his des­tiny, with the help of an ally (Anya Tay­lor-Joy) and the dark sor­cer­ess known as the Slav Witch (Björk).

While the metic­u­lous real­iza­tion of the set­ting marks this as Eggers’ unmis­tak­able hand­i­work, there’s an air of the epic here that hasn’t been seen in his oeu­vre before. The bat­tle scenes evok­ing the gnarly, dirt-caked clash­es of Game of Thrones (or, in all like­li­hood more accu­rate­ly, Nico­las Wind­ing Refn​’s Val­hal­la Ris­ing) move Eggers into an unfa­mil­iar mode, and per­haps a more com­mer­cial one as well – after all, this sure looks like his high­est-bud­get­ed film yet.

What­ev­er piv­ots the direc­tor makes in his next film, a few things are assured. We will behold the malev­o­lent might of the nat­ur­al world, we will learn a lot about how the Vikings lived beyond the clas­sic horned hats, and we will wit­ness the absolute oblit­er­a­tion of the fool­hardy Fjöl­nir. Can we skip ahead to 2022 already?

The North­man comes to cin­e­mas on 22 April, 2022.