Review of Valhalla Rising

This film treats its audience intelligently, and starts in medias res--we are shown One-Eye, silent as always, tied around his neck to a post in the middle of a mud pit and forced to fight two Viking-looking warriors. He brutalizes them. Money exchanges hands and One-Eye submissively allows himself to be transported back to his cage. We are left to piece the clues together ourselves, but Refn has a clear theme: obsessions with power. One-Eye is almost superhuman in his fighting abilities but when he is freed he is ineffably calm and collected, and no one dares to question his power--not even the group of Christian warriors that take him along for their journey to the Crusades. Without giving too much away, they never make it to the desert and the story gets more bizarre as the speaking characters lose their grip on their sanity and power. Everyone but One-Eye is lost and he has no answers for the Crusaders, though they see their fates in his eye, and his eye says to them: “You are all going to die.” The movie is an eclectic mix of anime-, western-, samurai-, and epic-styled films, and the mix serves it well. When I show this movie to friends, I don’t expect them to like it, but they’ve all been as mesmerized as I have. Mads Mikkelsen is to thank for this, saying so much without saying anything at all.