Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Valhalla Rising” is the rare movie that goes little beyond the sum of its parts: howling wind, impenetrable mist and men with dirty beards staring at each other. It’s the first Viking art film I’ve seen, and it doesn’t really make me want to dive into the genre.
Between “Casino Royale” and this movie, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mads Mikkelsen gets typecast as an inscrutably amoral man with eye problems. Here he plays “One Eye,” a mute man-beast who’s kept in a wooden cage and forced to fight for the entertainment of a roving band of mean-spirited pagans. It’s unclear why they bother keeping him around, really; one dude portentously warns another that “he’s never belonged to anyone for more than five years” and it’s not like they have amazing security. Whatever. He escapes, slaughters them in a gruesome, bone-crunching flurry of brutality and sets off on the road to wherever the fuck with the one creature he felt like sparing: an earnest little boy who makes himself useful by doing all the talking.
Soon, they run into a rival gang of Christians. One Eye’s reputation as a creature from Hell precedes him — and even seems to be compounded by the movie itself, which gives him demonic red-tinted flashbacks — but the Christians figure it’s better not to turn him away, so they let him join their crusade to Jerusalem. From that point forward, the movie devolves into a cold, Nordic mix of “Aguirre” and “Heart of Darkness” as the men sail a tiny rowboat into madness.
The film is unpleasant enough to work sometimes, positioning man against nature in a way that makes you think “WE ARE BUT CANNIBAL INSECTS” and positioning One Eye — who keeps his mouth shut and doesn’t care for religion — as a strange beacon of hope. Sometimes it makes you feel these things in your bones.
But most of the time it’s just unpleasant. Its lowest point is a montage that cuts between several images that are irredeemably nasty: one dude stabbing another, one dude raping another, a static shot of a wooden crucifix, a red-tinted flashback to an upside-down pool of water and One Eye building a tower out of rocks for some reason.
I understand that, in the words of King Leonidas, “This is madness!” That doesn’t make it any fun to watch.
The production aspires to be ‘elemental,’ but it ends up looking kind of basic and cheap. We never seem to leave the same cloudy valley, either because the filmmakers didn’t have enough money to shoot in another location or because it’s a psychologized landscape. Most likely both. In any case, the generic backdrop and over-the-top acting made me feel like I was watching prison inmates do cosplay.
Movies like this are endurance tests, I suppose — psychological castor oil. But even with that very generous criterion in mind, it’s hard to take “Valhalla Rising” as seriously as it takes itself. At one point, one of our intrepid Christians decides to share a dream he had the other night. If you can accept what he says — as out-of-context here as it is in the film — with all sincerity, I think this movie may be for you:
“I couldn’t find my way home … and then I realized I was dead.”
“Valhalla Rising” opens July 16.