There are stories that are worth their capacity not so much to narrate as to retell;
not so much for what they discover as for what they bring to mind.
Memory functions in them as one more pupil, as a sense to be added to the five most obvious.
Their mechanism is that of the myths recounted just before the dream: they stitch the fable with desire and serve as violent warnings as well as strangely immoral monuments.
Valhalla Rising
, by the always restless and unnerving Nicolas Winding Refn, is basically that:
a film that makes its footing in each of the old and universal narratives that give it the quality of the echo.
More than just ringing, it resonates.
It speaks of a redeeming and bloody hero eternally offered in sacrifice, it speaks of a merciless god, it speaks of a virgin and hostile land ... But, above all and above any will to tell anything, what matters is all that is silent .
The protagonist played by
the imposing Mads Mikkelsen (
Another Round
) moves across the screen like a wounded ghost.
He only has one eye and nothing to say.
Its only language is a primitive language and it precedes any form of spoken or written communication.
It is, basically, a horror film convinced of the cathartic power of blood
Let's say
the director watches arms before what will be his first big success.
Todo
Drive
, the film that made him famous and notable at Cannes the following year, is all contained in it.
Let's say that
the Danish Winding Refn polishes a good part of the brutal essays of expressive silence
(let's call it that) that he developed through his previous films such as the three installments of
Pusher
and
Bronson
.
It is silent, visceral, impressionistic cinema with a strange masculinity that is always unsuccessful.
It is a science fiction film "without science"
(the occurrence is from the director himself) that focuses on the violent story of a slave (One Eye / One eye) who understands freedom as an exercise of violence.
Nothing more.
The feature film wants to be a journey to the depths of an unknown place and necessarily oblivious to issues such as meaning, order or law.
It is a Viking western with the same reliability as a samurai film or a Samuel Beckett tragicomedy
.
It is an adventure film locked inside a nightmare.
It is, basically, a horror movie convinced of the cathartic power of blood.
For the end there is the reverberation of an eternal story transcribed on the screen with a transparent and voracious magnetism.
It is cinema and it is myth.
It is story and memory.
+ The feeling of suffocation can do everything in a provocative and strangely unpublished film exercise- All the vices of Winding Refn (pomposity, prizes and self-indulgence) are already pre-announced here.
But they are not very noticeable
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