‘THE NORTHMAN' AN AMBITIOUS, BUT LEAN REVENGE TALE

The first sign that not everyone in Robert Eggers’ 10th-century Viking revenge tale “The Northman” has their priorities entirely straight comes early in the film, when the Viking king Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) returns home to the North Atlantic kingdom of Hrafnsey after a year of fighting overseas.

After trudging up on horseback to the snowy cliffside village, Aurvandil’s queen, Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), greets him warmly and, after a hug for their son, Amleth (Oscar Novak), urges him to bed with her. Aurvandil, though, says he has something more pressing to attend to.

Rather than join his wife, he takes Amleth to scurry around a fiery cave on all fours, half-naked and barking, while chanting manly oaths of honor with the court fool (Willem Dafoe).

Something, you might say, is rotten in Hrafnsey — even if we have the sense that such rituals are the lifeblood of this culture.

It quickly turns for the worse. The brother of Aurvandil, Fjölnir (Claes Bang), cuts the throat of the king, assumes control and drags Gudrún off on his shoulders to take as his wife. Young Amleth — “just a puppy,” his mom had called him — flees in a rowboat on an empty sea, vowing his revenge.

Where are we, exactly? Smack in the middle of the Scandinavian legend that inspired Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” But in this Viking ur-“Hamlet” (Eggers penned the script with Icelandic poet Sjón) there’s no existential handwringing for Amleth over duty and fate. He lives for vengeance. When we next see him, he’s a ferocious and muscle-bound marauder — “a beast, cloaked in man-flesh” — who would snap most stage-bound Hamlets like a twig. Amleth (a bulked up Alexander Skarsgård) is less likely to soliloquize with a skull than sever one from someone’s body.