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Valhalla Rising
herine Bray
Shot on location in Mordor (and/or Scotland), Valhalla Rising is a bleak, otherworldly tracking of the progress of a man, known only as One-Eye (Mads Mikkelsen), through a largely empty Viking wilderness. This small Danish/UK co-production is a real opinion splitter; responses at the Toronto International Film Festival ranged from "easily the most extraordinary film I've seen at the festival this year, and I can't imagine anything else coming close" to "the most alienating displeasing mind-numbing cinematic garbage I've seen in a long time." It's certainly not a first date movie, an escapist popcorn flick or something to zone out to while you get over your hangover, but in a market glutted with such dubious palliatives, continued attempts by director Nicholas Winding Refn (Bronson) to offer an alternative are to be welcomed.
And Valhalla Rising certainly is different. Its protagonist is a man you might cross the street to avoid if he turned up in 21st century Britain, but if you encountered him in an ancient Norse wilderness, you'd want him on your side, not least because he's prone to lopping the head off anyone not on his side. A note for the squeamish: during the course of the film, One Eye encounters many people he does not consider to be on his side.
Although it's not like many other films, Valhalla Rising is not entirely without precedent. It plays rather like a film version of the Anglo Saxon elegies found in the tenth century codex The Exeter Book - poetry like The Seafarer or The Wanderer which starkly outline a world of grim hardship, dogged endurance and lone survival. A reworked extract from The Wanderer also survives in The Lord Of The Rings, spoken in Peter Jackson's version by King Theoden before going into battle ("Where is the horse and rider..."), and oddly enough, Valhalla Rising is a film that shares a couple of strands of DNA with J R R Tolkien's epic, both being concerned with the loneliness of heroes, travel in hostile lands and honour in even the bloodiest violence.
The Middle Earth connection isn't something I'd be wise to labour - Valhalla Rising doesn't have anything in the way of Hobbits, elves or talking trees, and as other reviewers have noted, professional madman Werner Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God also makes for a useful compare-and-contrast. A country mile away from being most people's cup of mead, Winding Refn has at least succeeded in bringing a credibility hitherto lacking in Viking movies to his vision of an inscrutable killing machine.
It's hard to imagine this director would have been as successful without leading man Mads Mikkelsen, Winding Refn's muse from the Pusher films, who disappears completely into the dispassionate one-eyed warrior. The cold heart of the film, he is part exiled hero in the samurai vein, part elemental force. One-Eye is deadly in the way that the sea or the mountains can be deadly - that is, irresistibly lethal, but hardly to blame for their nature. A meditation on the place of such a being in a world that could be heaven, hell or purgatory, Valhalla Rising may test your patience, but offers images unlike anything else you're likely to see this year.
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