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movie review - Valhalla Rising

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

This is an unrelentingly unpleasant movie in which an unspeaking slave finds freedom when his captors are attacked. It's set somewhere in Scandinavia during the Christian "conversion" of those lands. The weather is often cold and lousy, the people (virtually all male) are miserable dullards and brutes, and everything is terrible. The tone never improves from here, it's just an off-putting assault.

Our "hero" for want of a better word then makes his way with a young traveling companion onto a boat. It's bound for the holy land, but fetches up in the New World. Where of course the violence continues. There's a bit of religious stuff tacked on to the end, where we're to believe that this endlessly violent and seemingly unemotional slave is some kind of messiah. But I'm not sure. The entire ending spirals out of control, like the actors had taken over the set and were just competing for screen time.

Not recommended.