Let's talk about that crazy Nicole Kidman scene
Nicole Kidman spends most of her time in the Northerner lurking around the edges of the story.
She plays Queen Gudrún in the Viking epic, the steadfast wife of King Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke), whose return home after a near-fatal battle abroad sets the story in motion.
Gudrún begins the film resigned to faithfully sitting by her side, taking care of her son and quietly presiding over the festive dinners. It doesn't take long to wonder why a scene stealer like Kidman was cast in such a seemingly small and quiet role. That question remains unanswered until a twisted monologue scene in the film's third act, one that finally puts all of Kidman's wild instincts on display.
However, it takes her a while to get there. After the king is killed by his brother Fjölnir, the young prince Amleth (played as a child by Óscar Novak and as an adult by Alejandro Skarsgård) must Fjölnir away from home. As he does so, he sees her mother one last time, watching her cry over her violent betrayal. (Or so she thinks!) For the rest of the film, her mantra is simple: “Avenge the father. Save mother. Kill Fjölnir. Her mother, Amleth imagines, has been suffering at Fjölnir's side, forced to marry the man who killed her beloved husband.
More than a decade later, after Amleth becomes a corpulent Viking warrior, he arrives at the farmlands presided over by Fjölnir and Gudrún, posing as an enslaved prisoner. Although his mother seems to have a fairly peaceful life as Fjölnir's wife, he sets his plan in motion, slaughtering Fjölnir's men and revealing his true identity to his mother at her house.
It is then that Gudrún tells the truth to her son separated from her: she never loved her father. In fact, she was happy when he died and wanted Fjölnir to kill Amleth as well. Her encounter with Aurvandil was bad, she says, telling him that she was given to the king as a slave and that Amleth was the product of rape. “Your father put up with me because I gave him a son,” she tells him.
It's at this point that Kidman finally snaps a bit, devouring the camera with cruel revelations of him. Up to this point, Gudrún lives primarily as a memory of Amleth, a regal object with no inner life of its own. This scene changes all that, revealing just how naive Amleth's projections have been. He is prospering! Walking around town with his new heartthrob! Rebuilding his life, caring for his new child! She is unfazed as she retells all of this to Amleth, cutting him down to size with her words. Then, after revealing the truth to her, Gudrún takes things in an Oedipal direction, planting a kiss on her estranged son. It's all a distraction so she can try to kill Amleth, but she fails, and he promptly plunges a sword into her heart.
Kidman excels at this kind of subdued mania, deftly elevating auteur dramas by tackling complicated characters brimming with dark thoughts: the sly, grinning fame-seeker in To Die For; the bored swan from Eyes Wide Open Shut; the strange southern belle of The Newsboy; the disturbed mother in The Slaughter of a Sacred Deer. In the northerner, his screen time is much less than audiences might have expected, though that's probably by design. Where would be the surprise if we could feel all the time that Gudrún did not want to be saved? This scene offers an explanation of Kidman's casting, capitalizing on his talent and penchant for grounding a series of out-of-the-ordinary revelations.
It's also one of the few scenes in the norteño without cinematic bells and whistles, valuing the art of acting above anything else. In a film filled with physically demanding endeavors, including a highly choreographed raid scene and a battle scene, this scene allows Kidman herself to cause chaos. For Eggers, he was a dream anchor in the midst of a difficult shoot. "It was really so nice to be able to do essential scene work instead of an action sequence, for God's sake," he said recently. vanity fair, praising Kidman's performance. "That's one of the scenes I'm really proud of."
