The one-eyed Viking warrior with visions of terror and blood… if you take this outline as a starting point, you will form a certain expectation on what this film will look like. It does not look like that. It is terribly violent, grotesquely silent, and barrenly beautiful, with great visuals of the Northern European landscapes, and Vikings or Scottish crusaders wandering through it. They do not have an aim to begin with – Jersualem comes later, when the crusaders come by -, but moving seems to be a way of surviving by creating chances to encounter other tribes – and ideally slaughtering them. And then the world turns red, and the visions come, and all seems like hell has come to earth, and then everybody is dead, kind of.
I would love to say that it is a great art house variation on the topic of Viking movies, but it is not, really. It is dull and boring at times, and altogether half an hour too long. The long and silent shots, with an eerie score on the soundtrack, make me imagine what it would be like to see that film while sitting in the projection hall of a modern art museum. That sounds about right. It is not so much a movie, but a media installation with Vikings.
thomas4cinema 