Val­hal­la Rising

You could call this fog-bound jour­ney into a Nordic heart of dark­ness Nico­las Wind­ing Refn’s Apoc­a­lypse Now. Except that it was shot for pen­nies in a dig­i­tal­ly desat­u­rat­ed Scot­land; sets its tale of doomed West­ern impe­ri­al­ism among Viking Chris­tians in Amer­i­ca; and requires a mighty effort to get to grips with what­ev­er Refn may real­ly be up to beneath its grunt­ing vio­lence and stark mood.

Mads Mikkelsen’s One-Eye is a chained, mute slave pit­ted against a pagan chief’s rivals in pri­mor­dial bat­tles that are more cock-fights than glad­i­a­to­r­i­al duels. With the help of Are (Maarten Steven­son), a fright­ened blond boy who is the film’s lone spark of inno­cence, he escapes to take up with Chris­t­ian Vikings who sail for the Cru­sades but, adrift in yel­low mist, end at the oth­er pagan end of the world, North America.

The pulpy Vikings ver­sus indi­ans flick this could have been is ignored, the inhab­i­tants of this alien land remain­ing invis­i­ble, hos­tile pres­ences in the for­est until they final­ly appear as motion­less, pre­his­toric red war­riors on the hori­zon. Even here, any expec­ta­tion that One-Eye’s Viking Samu­rai killing machine will carve his way through them are quick­ly dashed.

The Scors­ese-style extreme vio­lence of Push­er and Bleed­er, the oppres­sive­ly bril­liant Copen­hagen street movies that made Refn’s name, is con­fined to ear­ly vein-gey­ser­ing duels. One-Eye’s mag­i­cal way with axe and knife nods instead to Asian action cin­e­ma and spaghet­ti west­erns: he’s Refn’s Man With No Name.

Just as his last film, Bron­son, dodged expec­ta­tions of a straight, bru­tal biopic of ​‘Britain’s most vio­lent pris­on­er’ to sur­re­al­ly and sym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly play with Bronson’s own myth-mak­ing, so Refn sails fur­ther out here. The still, fog-shroud­ed waters in which the Vikings are lost – a lim­bo or tun­nel fun­nelling them into America’s bright green hell – may rep­re­sent Refn him­self, feel­ing his way into unchart­ed direc­to­r­i­al ter­ri­to­ry, set­ting out just to see what he might find.

Val­hal­la Rising’s prob­lem is that it’s easy to watch it and think all he’s found is a pre­ten­tious sword-and-sor­cery film. Like the acid-inspired cult com­ic-books of Grant Mor­ri­son, you either buy into the sub­ter­ranean labyrinths of sym­bol­ic mean­ing, or you don’t. The sheer strange­ness of the Vikings’ voy­age through a medieval Twi­light Zone, the nat­u­ral­is­tic creak of sails, tim­ber and clothes in this lost world, and the low pulse of Peter Peter and Peter Kyed’s Car­pen­ter-esque score cer­tain­ly grow in atmosphere.

And Mikkelsen’s hero­ical­ly impas­sive per­for­mance becomes sud­den­ly mov­ing when you reg­is­ter how his automa­ton move­ments gain a humane urgency when he decides to save the boy from the unpleas­ant fate Amer­i­ca has wait­ing for its first vis­i­tors. But Refn’s ellip­ti­cal­ly framed approach to a sto­ry that func­tions more like a dream doesn’t get any more intelligible.

Giv­ing in to this trip is final­ly more fun than hol­ler­ing at it to make more sense. Large parts of it don’t work. But it’s a brave, tran­si­tion­al work by a fine direc­tor feel­ing his way towards some­thing new with­out much car­ing if he fails.