Abdulla Alsaleh’s review published on Letterboxd:
Today marks the third anniversary of me making my Letterboxd account, and it was also the day where I finally finished all of my exams, meaning that I'll be graduating from high school later this month. I wanted to celebrate by watching something in the theater, and while I wasn't entirely sure if The Northman was even going to come out in Bahraini theaters, it thankfully did, and so I was able to watch it on the big screen. Both of Robert Eggers' last two films, The Witch and The Lighthouse, have grown to be some of my very favorite movies of all time, and not only was I excited for this movie to come out, but I was also interested in seeing what Eggers would do with a budget that was over eight times more expensive than what he used to make The Lighthouse. I believe that his first two movies greatly benefitted from their small scales, but because of how phenomenal The Northman was, I am now of the opinion that we should give Robert Eggers as much money as possible so that he can make whatever he wants.
What's interesting about The Northman is that it uses everything that made Robert Eggers' horror movies so scary to make this one feel so feral, brutal, and mythological. The film's literary dialogue, phenomenal score, horrific violence, and dedication to its 10th Century Iceland setting all do their part to elevate this movie's atmosphere of primal, dirty, blood-soaked rage, along with some truly gorgeous cinematography that is always lit by either fire or the sky itself. I also loved just how seriously the film's Norse mythology was taken, as The Northman blended its more fantastical scenes with the rest of the film's grounded ferocity in ways that other movies like The Green Knight could only dream of doing. Like everything else in the movie, the acting in The Northman was phenomenal, and I thought that everyone was perfectly cast for their roles, especially with Alexander Skarsgård being the film's animalistic and relentlessly committed lead. The only negative thing that I even have to say about my experience with The Northman doesn't have anything to really do with the film itself, and that is how some of the scenes were cut out here in Bahrain because our theaters apparently think that we can't handle nudity in our movies. That one issue still didn't detract from just how much I loved The Northman, though, and if The Witch and The Lighthouse made me consider Robert Eggers to be one of my favorite filmmakers, then The Northman just confirms it.
