Valhalla Rising (2009)
Average Rating: 6.5/10
Reviews Counted: 55
Fresh: 39 | Rotten: 16
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 6.4/10
Critic Reviews: 13
Fresh: 9 | Rotten: 4
No consensus yet.
liked it
Average Rating: 3/5
User Ratings: 16,009
My Rating
Movie Info
For years, the fearsome figure known only as One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen - PUSHER, FLAME & CITRON, CASINO ROYALE) has defeated everyone he's encountered, but he's treated more like an animal than a warrior. The only person he has any relationship with is the young boy who brings him food and water daily. Constantly caged and shackled, One Eye has drawn the attention of a new force now sweeping the countryside and displacing the society's leaders: Christians.-- (C) IFC Films
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Cast
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Mads Mikkelsen
One Eye -
Maarten Stevenson
The Boy -
Gordon Brown
Hagen -
Andrew Flanagan
Gudmond -
Gary Lewis
Kare -
Gary McCormack
Hauk -
Alexander Morton
Barde -
Jamie Sives
Gorm -
Ewan Stewart
Eirik -
Matthew Zajac
Malkolm -
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Valhalla Rising Trailer & Photos
All Critics (55) | Top Critics (13) | Fresh (39) | Rotten (16)
It's a chilly, often slow, uncompromisingly harsh film, but Refn's images will sear your retinas.
Top CriticIf only the pieces added up to an experience that sticks and that didn't finally succumb to a shrug of entropy.
You sometimes wish Refn's gift for Ridley Scott-level mayhem had won the battle over his much iffier Werner Herzog leanings.
It's a trip into a primordial world and primeval sensibilities, and if you're looking to shake off the mall-movie blahs, there are few better places to look.
Mr. Refn, who can pull off stylish brutality (in the Pusher films and Bronson), shows no knack for the kind of visionary, hallucinatory image making that would render Valhalla Rising memorable.
Lots of movies about the Middle Ages can do the mud and blood -- though we sure see a lot of both here -- but in this movie it's like Refn has ripped you out of time and dropped you there.
Mikkelsen verifies that, even without saying a word, he's an unnervingly unhinged presence.
Filled with brutality.
A mad meditation on the primeval nature of man, faith and survival, this is Apocalypse Then, and then some.
Directed in moody and portentous strokes by Nicolas Winding Refn, this is the most abstract Viking movie you'll ever see...
Less Braveheart than Aguirre, The Wrath of God, this evocative Viking tone poem contemplates the convergence between violence and religion.
A Nordic odyssey straight down to Jerusalem
I appreciate Refn for pushing against conventions of rhythm, photography, subject, color, and form, and I don't mind that Valhalla Rising lacks a story so much as I question its reliance on enigmatic hints of some grand, over-arching abstraction.
It's like a gorgeous graphic novel with a protagonist and story that vanish utterly from the mind as soon as the last page is turned.
Aguirre as conceptualized by Jim Jarmusch and executed by Terrence Malick.
This is Aguirre, the Wrath of God, with the despondency jacked to 11.
For an ugly, brutish, überviolent Viking epic, Valhalla Rising is gorgeous, each frame a haunting work of art. Refn's style, though, is unsustainable at feature length.
In the mood for a slower-than-molasses viking movie inspired by spaghetti westerns and samurai swordplay epics. Have we got the flick for YOU!
so formless and arbitrary in meaning that it all borders on pretentiousness
a viking-adventure-cum-acid-trip
Like a John Milius film reduced to its pure, masculine essence and shot through one of Alejandro Jodorowsky's lens filters.
The visual beauty is exceeded only by the gruesomeness of some of the violence...
Audience Reviews for Valhalla Rising
Super Reviewer
"Valhalla Rising" is one of those increasingly slow films that has a weird way of getting underneath your skin without testing your patience. Regardless of it's incredibly slow pacing it has an extraordinary grip on you, and there are very few films that can do that whilst feeling the need to really take their time. But a film can only do that for so long, and although I adore films with substance this really has trouble getting across it's message without staggering and fails to unfold it comprehensibly. It has it's upsides, I particularly enjoyed Nicolas Winding Refyn's mesmeric direction and the atmospheric cinematography beautifully shot by Morten Søborg but even though it manages to look visually stunning and powerfully acted the story fails to revel in it's simplicity and tries far too hard to be something profound. It could have been a fantastically thought provoking art house movie if it didn't try to shove so many metaphors down your throat. Consequently it just feels self important and you end up admiring the visuals alone. That said I will commend Refyn's style and his scriptwriting but overall it's far too narratively flimsy to be something great. Which is something that it could have potentially been. I enjoyed it because it provokes great intrigue and captures some fine mountain landscapes in a way many action-fantasy films have failed to do, even though it isn't one of them. I can't honestly say there's much going on underneath the surface and the muddled up poetry that's supposedly at work, but strangely, it can prove to be quite entertaining if your a fan of movies that try to deal with issues that regard both redemption and religious beliefs in dark, peculiar ways. However, it doesn't hang together the way that it should. There is stuff in there, it's just the overly puzzling matter of finding it.
Super Reviewer
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- The Boy: You need a name, and you've only got one eye.
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- Barde: They eat their own god, eat his flesh, drink his blood, abominable.
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- Eirik: God brought us out of that mist for a reason. We claim this land in His name.
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- Kare: I am going to show them that a man of God has arrived.
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Foreign Titles
- Le Guerrier silencieux (FR)
