Valhalla Rising (2010)

It’s hard to know what to make of Valhalla Rising. The title alone seems to promise relentless scenes of Viking axe swinging and sword fighting. When I saw the poster of a bare-chested, tribal-tattooed Mads Mikkelsen in chains, scenes of a pagan warrior on an epic mission practically edited themselves in my brain. I pictured a hybrid of Conan the Barbarian and Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. This was not that movie.

It seems to start off that way, though, with our badly scarred hero (Mikkelsen) crushing the skull of one foe and snapping the neck of another in vividly filmed bloody detail. As the camera pans his face and the empty eye socket on one side of it, we come to learn that he is a slave, a mute foreigner made to fight for the amusement of his Scottish captor. But, it’s ominously pointed out, he’s never been owned by any one person for more than five years and Scottie is dangerously close to the end of his lease.

One disembowelment and a decapitated head on a pike later and our hero is free. Only a young boy (Maarten Stevenson) survives the uprising, begins to trail behind him, and nicknames him One Eye for the obvious reason. Eventually the pair joins with a group of Viking Christians on their way to the first crusade in Jerusalem. The boy acts as One Eye’s voice, ascribing to him a supernatural origin story and desperate desire to return home.

The rest of Danish writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn’s six-chapter film is a study in silence. Not that it’s been very chatty up to this point. No more than 15 words are spoken in the first 15 minutes of the film. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this review contained more words than the entire screenplay of Valhalla Rising. The only constant sound is a snare drum that beats hypnotically throughout each chapter like a heartbeat or, more aptly, funeral drums.

Those drums accompany the eerie-beautiful pictures presented in deliberately manipulated color by cinematographer Morton SØborg. Throughout the film, One Eye’s proleptic dreams of violence are awash in red, while all of his waking moments are drained almost entirely of color. During the movie’s second chapter, “Silent Warrior,” you can almost feel the chill coming off the Scottish highlands as One Eye and The Boy cross the countryside. In the third chapter, “Men of God,” One Eye and the Christians travel through a blue-grey fog so dense (and for so long) that it was more uncomfortable to watch than all of the bloodshed.

Undoubtedly, the bloodshed is gruesome and plentiful–Valhalla Rising has a body count higher than a Shakespeare tragedy–yet it still feels less like an avenging warrior epic than it does like watching war paint dry. That’s because One Eye, as played with contented knowing by Mikkelsen (previously eyeless as Bond baddie Le Chiffre in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace) is more of an idea than a character. An allegorical conflation of Jesus Christ and the half-blind Norse wanderer god, Odin, guardian of Valhalla, One Eye represents…

Who am I kidding? I have no idea what he represents. Although each line of Refn’s sparse dialogue and each of his visually arresting images is intentional and executed well, I found it nearly impossible to decipher the meaning of this film. Still, Valhalla Rising is so strangely beautiful, unique, and entrancing, it’s worth the trip to the theater. Maybe afterwards you can explain it to me.