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Valhalla Rising (2010)

Written by Nicolas Winding Refn and Roy Jacobsen

Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

Starring Mads Mikkelsen

The latest release from Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish director behind the Pusher trilogy and Bronson, Valhalla Rising is an atmospheric and dreamy mood piece that moves beyond the director’s previous forays into narrative and asserts itself as less of a story than a poem. Divided into 6 parts, the film follows One-Eye (Mads Mikkelsen, who you may remember as Le Chiffre from Casino Royale), a mysterious and silent man kept as a gladiator of sorts by pagan Vikings (circa 1000 AD). He is our main character, accompanied only by a young boy (who he speaks through by proxy) on a journey from slavery to the New World. The plot is simple — One-Eye escapes his confines, meets a group of Viking Christians, and joins them on a boat trip to a strange new land where they are hunted. Comparisons to Aguirre: Wrath of God would be apt (and probably appreciated by Refn), as the Steadicam/handheld feel of the film combined with this unseen threat (arrows coming out of nowhere) make the similarities clear.

Still, this is not a docu-drama film, and while the camera’s ability to capture breathtaking landscapes and gritty close-ups at the same time is impressive, the mood is never insistently realistic. This isn’t Paul Greengrass. Refn is more interested in creating atmosphere than verité. Early in Valhalla Rising, motifs are established that come to repeat as the narrative progresses. Not only does Refn repeatedly use certain shots (framing the current leader on the far side of the frame in close-up with his gang neatly arranged in the background is a shot that makes several appearances, for one), but he interjects hallucinatory visions in key places throughout the runtime. These flash-forwards, painted in bright crimson red and black and white, reveal snippets of what’s to come, but aren’t so much designed to tease as to continually drive home a mood of apocalyptic inevitability.

Separated into sections and complete with visual motifs, Valhalla Rising is very much about the sum of the parts being greater than the whole. Everything in the film works via juxtaposition, a collage that functions thematically as well as structurally. At the film’s start, for instance, the primary conflict is between One-Eye and his pagan captors, but this changes to be Pagans vs. Christians, One-Eye vs. Christians, One-Eye & Christians vs. Nature, etc.  Mads Mikkelsen plays his wordless role with supreme grace, hovering between the animalistic and the wise with only slight visual hints at his true nature. Thus he is the main character, a man who straddles the line everyone else is trying to make a clear stand on. These other characters help fill in the human perspective, delivering monologues to each other in voice-over so that we have someone to identify with or hate. As fluid and trippy as the movie is, the Christians and Pagans help ground the audience in the moment, and in turn define One-Eye by what he is not.

Definition by absence is at the heart of Valhalla Rising. Never is anything clearly explained, but rather gleaned from impressions. Every time a new part is introduced, a title card is thrown up on the screen with a subtitle, superimposed over a new and distinct landscape color-tinted in a new way. Part one is foggy and grey, part two begins with bright green grass, part three with an orangish water — rather than have his characters talk and explain their fears explicitly, Refn opts to alter the mood visually. The violence of part one, the new beginning of part two, and the marooned despair of part three are signified just as much with their opening shots as anything else. The soundtrack, an ominous tonal vibration David Lynch might use for a dream sequence, also helps to tie the disparate parts together under a dark omen.

Dark omens and religious terror fuel the uneasy footing and uncertainty behind the men One-Eye encounters. Valhalla Rising is very much a film about modern religion’s struggle with basic human barbarism. When the group lands on the New World, they think they’re in Hell, and the Christians proceed to revel in the mud like lunatics. They have come to conquer and convert (except for one truly righteous man, and he gets a special shot with sunlight beaming down on him), but their motives are based in expectation of future glory. One-Eye, who is already battling to the death in the mud when we first meet him, understands and respects Nature, and as such, truly fears and respects “God”. He is at the center of the film precisely because of his lack of typical human motives, and is able to survive because of it. Much like last year’s Antichrist, Valhalla Rising pits the seemingly logical desires of “men of god” against the unsympathetic arms of the natural world, and in turn creates a Hell-on-Earth out of both the dangers of undiscovered country and the human mind when out of its element.

Grade: A