Valhalla Rising (2010)

Valhalla Rising arrives from 2009 with the confidence of a film that has no interest in being liked, and it is not. Nicolas Winding Refn sends Mads Mikkelsen, mute and one-eyed, across a Scottish bog and onto a fog-bound Viking vessel crewed by Christian crusaders who believe they are bound for the Holy Land. They are not. What follows is a long, nearly wordless trudge through mud, starvation, and violence, and we are invited to find it profound. The title borrows from Kenneth Anger; the film borrows from nobody, which is its one generous act.

For the purposes of cultural accounting, the ledger comes up nearly blank. The cast is uniformly white and male. The lone prominent female presence is absent entirely. The film offers no economic critique, no environmental conscience, no body-positive affirmation, no neurodivergent framing. One-Eye's muteness is a mythic wound, not an identity. The crusaders' slaughter of the indigenous Skrælings carries a faint anti-colonial murmur, though Refn frames it as religious fanaticism, which is a different animal altogether. The camera holds on wet stone and grey sky for minutes at a time, and the film's politics remain equally still.

The most striking quality here is how little the film lectures. There is no sermon, no moral instruction, no closing title card explaining what we should have absorbed. Refn points the camera at the weather and lets Peter Peter's score drone. Danish critics split on the matter; one called it unbearably self-important, another a masterpiece. Both are correct. It recouped a small fraction of its budget, which the film seems to regard as a point of honor. The motion picture is a mood, and the mood is damp.