First, there was only man and nature. Then men came with crosses and forced the heathen to the fringes of the earth. The new film by Nicolas Winding Refn, VALHALLA RISING, pits the man with no name, One Eye (a superb, superlatively brooding Mads Mikkelsen), a mute warrior ‘from across the ocean’, against his equally godless Scottish slave masters on a mud-caked, out-of-time blasted heath in the Highlands. After he has escaped his shackles and disembowels the owner who had tied to him to a post to fight for money (and stave challengers’ heads in) he encounters a group of Christian zealots and heads across the ocean in search of the ‘Holy Land’.
Winding Refn’s films are dependably different each time. He made his name in his early twenties directing the pulsing, drug-dealer-in-a-whole-heap-of-trouble PUSHER, and more recently BRONSON, extracting a brilliant performance from Tom Hardy as the eponymous one man prison riot. The latter was a tribute to Kubrick in its depiction of institutionalized cruelty and stark, clean visual design. Watching the screening of VALHALLA RISING during this year’s London Film Festival, his reference point was more like the visual poetry of Terence Malick, particularly the scenes set in the New World which soon descend into psychedelic nightmare, ramped up by a droning soundscape that builds to a doom-bringing climax like the mythic Gjallarhorn.
The film has been made with a very tight budget; what money they had spent on gore-soaked effects and the beautiful, colour-drained cinematography. I don’t think I have ever seen the bleakness and beauty of Scotland so well depicted. Divided into six sections, the film suffers during its third part as they cross the ocean in complete fog-bound stillness, in what is clearly a water tank, bringing to mind cheap BBC productions like VOYAGE OF THE DAWNTREADER. But that’s forgivable since this is a mood piece, and even when it’s obvious that they aren’t filming in Canada, but another part of Scotland with pine forests, the errant Christians are so far gone in their nightmarish trip that they could be hallucinating the whole thing anyway.
VALHALLA RISING is destined to be a cult classic, but I doubt it will sail much further. A Viking movie in the true sense of the Old Norse of vikingr, ‘one who goes on an expedition’, it is a visceral and almost ridiculously grim experience which confirms its Danish director as one of cinema’s most interesting voyagers.
