It's not as if he doesn't have the opportunity. But the most surprising and ultimately frustrating thing that Amleth shares with Hamlet is that he keeps putting off the job of dispatching his uncle. They even include some witty Shakespearean allusions, such as a scene in which Amleth is presented with the skull of a long-dead jester (played, when he was alive, by a gleeful Willem Dafoe). If the plot and the protagonist's name sound familiar, that's because Eggers and his Icelandic co-writer, Sjón (Lamb), adapted the same tale that Shakespeare drew on for Hamlet. But, unfortunately for him, his remarkably incompetent henchmen fail to kill young Amleth, who then grows up to be a glowering hunk played by Alexander Skarsgård, and vows to get his revenge.

Before they can, though, the king's resentful brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang from The Square and the BBC's Dracula) kills the king and carries off the queen. Ethan Hawke and a fabulously wild Nicole Kidman play a Viking king and queen who are preparing to pass the throne to their bright-eyed son Amleth in AD895. But in The Northman, he does all that on a bigger scale, with a bigger budget and bigger stars.

The film is directed and co-written by Robert Eggers, the maker of The Witch and The Lighthouse. Once again, he has recreated a bygone period with a specificity and sensitivity that suggest he may well be a time traveller, and once again he has infested that period with all the weirdness and violence of its most disturbing folklore. Why The Godfather has been misunderstood And yet, despite all of the strangeness and brutality mentioned above, The Northman isn't quite strange or brutal enough. It's not your typical Friday night at the cinema. Noses are bitten off, throats are torn out, and a man staggers into a fire, holding handfuls of his own entrails. It's a film in which Björk plays a witch with no eyes and a wheat-sheaf headdress, and a frenzied Valkyrie rides a white horse across the sky. The Northman is a film in which a Viking prince proves his worthiness by farting, and then levitates while his father's innards morph into a magical fortune-telling tree.

Northmen longphort