Just saw Valhalla Rising by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, and featuring Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen as the main character, One Eye.
The story is set around 1000 AD. What appears to be a bunch of pagan and newly converted norsemen or celts travel by longboat through endless mist, aiming for the Holy Land. In fact they travel the exact opposite direction and land in North America where they are one by one killed off by a very unpleasantly portrayed tribe of Indians, but at the same time meet their individual destinies.
This movie is odd to say the least. Hypnotic and misty. Raw, cold and dirty. Violent. It's beautifully shot, but the story remains as vague as the fog that envelops it. There is very little dialogue; Mads Mikkelsen for example doesn't utter a single word in the whole movie.
The (non)-meeting of these pagan europeans with american indigenous people I find interesting though. The atmosphere of it all reminds of the arrival of Willard upriver at the camp of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Something very primitive, pagan and deeply disturbing. Perhaps this movie is to be read as a new and quite abstract interpretation of The Heart of Darkness? Anyway, it's intriguing.
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