This is perhaps the oddest of the Medieval flics I’ve seen recently. Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, best known for his Push series of thrillers, has created a relentlessly enigmatic, grim, and violent film set in the year 1000 AD. The lead role is played by Mads Mikkelson, who starred in two of the Push films, and has gone on to a Hollywood career. Valhalla Rising is obviously aimed at the “art house” crowd, and in those circles, it has achieved critical success (with some notable dissention). Unfortunately, the distributors promoted it as an “action” picture, trying to sell it to people who liked Braveheart or Highlander. Those viewers were bound to be disappointed with its minimal plot, long actionless segments, dream sequences, and unexplained events. The film cost £4,000,000 to produce and didn’t make a dime.
Actually, there’s a perfectly straightforward interpretation of everything that happens in the film, but it must be guessed as one goes. A pagan Norseman named One-Eye escapes from captivity in the Scottish highlands. After taking vengeance on his captors, he is joined by a boy named Ari. Together, they join with a party of Scottish crusaders, bound for the Holy Land. Their ship is lost in the fog, and ends up in a mysterious land, obviously meant to be Quebec (they enter a vast river estuary that runs fresh). The film was shot in Scotland, and the landscape looks vaguely right, but the vegetation is all wrong. They fight among themselves, take a hallucinatory drug, wander around, and are attacked by natives. Everyone dies except the boy. Not much of a plot, but the events are intended primarily as a coat-hanger for visual images.
The Native Canadians who appear toward the end of the film look rather odd. They are painted from head to foot in red ochre (which has some historical support). Well, there is no reason why they should have looked as they did six centuries later. But they just don’t look right physiognomically. I looked closely at the closing credits, and found that every single actor who plays one has a Tibetan name!
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