When totally preventable tragedy strikes anywhere in the world, it’s the fashion among Americans to respond with a three-word bromide: “Thoughts and prayers.” Notre Dame’s burning? Thoughts and prayers. Tsunami causing a nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan? Thoughts and prayers. Active shooter slaughtering children at school? Thoughts and prayers. Wildfires raging across California? Thoughts and prayers. Highly transmissible virus ravaging the economy, incurring a death toll of 100,000 Americans and rising, and straining the medical system like belt buckles after Thanksgiving dinner? Thoughts and prayers. (Thoughts and prayers are never accorded to Black people murdered by police, however.)
The great Dane Nicolas Winding Refn had none of this in mind while shooting his 2009 movie “Valhalla Rising,” mostly because “thoughts and prayers” hadn’t calcified into a meme just yet, but in 2020, as the picture hits Blu-ray for the first time courtesy of IFC, thoughts and prayers make up the central cultural critique of Refn’s screenplay (co-written with Roy Jacobsen). In a broader context, the movie is a rebuke of Christian colonialism, set among a clan of Norsemen holding onto a tenuous peace with Christian crusaders in the Scottish Highlands; the former pays for their safety with coin while the latter goes a-cleansing the land of heathens either by converting them or by killing them. (Guess which one happens more often?)
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Caught in this grim struggle is a mute Norse warrior (Mads Mikkelsen), a man with no name until he’s given one by a tow-headed boy (Maarten Stevenson), who serves as his herald and his groupie. “One-Eye,” the boy dubs the man, a lesson to us all that if we can avoid it, we should never let kids choose our nicknames for us. One-Eye regularly sees visions of the future, which first show him the key to his freedom—an arrowhead at the bottom of a pool—and ultimately lead him to his demise, which, unlike everyone else in the film, he confronts head-on and without fear. In between his rebirth and his death, One-Eye slays his captors, and with the boy’s help falls in with the crusaders, led by the General (Ewan Stewart) and his lifelong friend and comrade, a Priest (Gary Lewis), both of whom are given no proper names, just like One-Eye.
The General and the Priest plan to set sail across the sea to the Holy Land, but because they’re mortal men, they neglect to bring a map and refuse to ask for directions, so they wind up in North America instead. The General isn’t deterred by the setback; he harbors zealous delusions of grandeur, declaring war on the land’s native inhabitants, intending to, unsurprisingly, eradicate them all and establish a “new Jerusalem.” Basically, typical Christian conqueror stuff. In between planning and conquering, the General, the Priest, and their men wind up bobbing around in the North Atlantic, everyone aboard the ship increasingly aware that they’re lost, low on supplies, and possibly subject to an evil curse incurred by the presence of One-Eye and the boy.
It’s the Priest who tries his best to keep the gang sane, praying fruitlessly to a God who doesn’t listen because he doesn’t damn well exist: He prays for wind to lift the mist and guide them to the Holy Land, commending into His hands their swords and souls, for all that’s worth once “Valhalla Rising” winds down and all these poor saps are either dead, dying, or wandering into the wilderness to God only knows what ends. All the thoughts, prayers, and beseechments do not, cannot save these doomed men. Frankly, they died the moment they joined the General’s ill-fated quest for glory.
At the heart of “Valhalla Rising” stands One-Eye, a role that demonstrates Mikkelsen’s fluency in silence. Not that he couldn’t knock a grand, moving, well-written speech out of the park, of course; give him any dialogue and he’ll give it heft. But Mikkelsen, unlike so many of his peers, speaks loudest when he doesn’t speak at all. One-Eye gazes at the world around him in placid thought, belying the brutality he’s capable of when pushed: This is a man who sees all, and even knows all, cutting a more deific figure than the god the General and his soldiers worship. The film’s bitter punchline is that it’s the warrior, not the Christian men of faith, who’s actually omniscient, and being omniscient, he has little reason to say anything at all.
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By contrast, the General talks to his detriment. “We stay and we show them what men are capable of when they act in the name of God,” he bloviates to his wavering troops. “We’ve raised the cross. Now we bring the sword. The heathen will be converted, their sins cleansed, a new Jerusalem established!” They’re just words. The soldiers either die by One-Eye’s hand—the guy has a zero-tolerance policy for backstabbing betrayals—or at the business end of the natives’ arrows, including the General, who, having lost his men, his cause, and all of his marbles, sticks a dagger in the Priest’s gut for choosing to follow One-Eye rather than him. (If that isn’t an apt metaphor for present-day American leadership, nothing is.) Really, no one makes it out alive here, except the boy, and even he ends the film in an uncertain place. But making it out alive isn’t the point. The point is figuring out one’s place in life’s greater scheme, even if that means dying.
Only One-Eye understands the universe’s cruel design, but he’s okay with it, though he admittedly does go to meet mortality on behalf of bizarre prophetic flashes of what’s to come. Refn’s trademarked hyper-stylization is mostly absent in “Valhalla Rising,” other than in these moments of augury, where color blasts into frame with such blunt impact that the knee-jerk reaction would be to call them “psychedelic” or “hallucinatory.” The first designation is a crock; the second is the truth. There’s no god in “Valhalla Rising,” no higher power heeding man’s appeals, and no amount of either thoughts or prayers will avail the fools who rely on them. Refn has made movies more widely embraced by critics, like “Drive,” “Bronson,” and “The Neon Demon,” but none as enduring, or accidentally prescient, as this.
