VALHALLA RISING
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
Produced by Johnny Andersen, Bo Ehrhardt & Henrik Danstrup
Written by Refn & Roy Jacobsen
Released by IFC Films
Denmark/UK. 92 min. Not Rated
With Mads Mikkelsen, Maarten Stevenson, Gordon Brown, Andrew Flanagan, Gary Lewis & Ewan Stewart 
 

Almost one thousand years ago, a couple of ships full of Scandinavian settlers got lost in a storm while sailing to Greenland and wound up somewhere along the Eastern coast of Canada or Maine. There, according to the two sagas about the incident, they met up with Native Americans (whom they called skraelings or “wretches”). A quarrel broke out after the Vikings refused to sell weapons, and the two sides fought, with the Norsemen defending themselves by releasing a bull, an animal which terrified the Indians, who had never seen one before. Many of the Vikings died, but the survivors packed into a ship and hightailed it back to Northern Europe.

It seems like great material for a movie, and it is, but so far it has stubbornly resisted all attempts to turn it into one (see, or rather don’t, the 2007 version of Pathfinder). In Valhalla Rising, director Nicolas Winding Refn takes the latest stab at the story, and it’s a dull, pretentious slog, a Viking flick as made by a film student addled by watching too much Werner Herzog and Stan Brakhage. Composed mostly of artsy, wordless shots of grim-faced men walking up and down hills or muttering sententiously into the camera, Valhalla Rising is an ultra-violent and extremely drawn out mash note to paganism. 

Mads Mikkelsen plays One Eye, a mute, one-eyed heathen captive forced to fight in the mud for his owners somewhere in 11^th century Scotland. Eventually, he and a slave boy (Maarten Stevenson) escape—after literally tearing out someone’s guts—then get mixed up with some Christians on their way to the Holy Land. Their boat, lost in a fog, winds up in the New World, where some of the crusaders go nuts and the rest are killed off by an unseen foe.

But the movie is told through disjointed, heavily stylized scenes, broken into chapters (with titles like “Hell”) and scrubbed clean of nearly all dialogue and anything remotely like a sense of humor. The only laughs are unintentional, as in the scenes when One Eye sees into the future (apparently), which the film indicates by bathing the screen red and cutting to a harsh, red-lit close-up of Mikkelsen’s face.

And I get it: One Eye was one of the names for Odin, who sacrificed an eye to gain knowledge. But the film’s so cryptic, and emotionally disengaged, that this only feels like an Easter egg, a bit of trivia (“Maybe Mikkelsen’s really Odin!”), and not the profound insight into the last days of paganism the filmmakers might think it is. Brendon Nafziger
July 16, 2010