From Richard Brody's New Yorker review of Robert Eggers' The Northman ("Just a Bunch of Research and Gore"): "To tell this story, which Eggers co-wrote with the Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón, the director creates a pictorial world of visions and wonders, muck and gore, to evoke the crudeness and the cruelty, the mystical tenor and animistic passion, of the Viking realm -- of rural Northern European medieval society over all.