ROBERT EGGERS’ LATEST FILM IS A 3-HOUR SLOW-MOTION MONTAGE OF BEARDS DECIDING WHETHER OR NOT TO KILL EACH OTHER
Look, I get it. We’re all still recovering from the collective psychic damage of *The Northman*. We watched Alexander Skarsgård raw-dog the 10th century for two and a half hours, screaming about fate and sniffing pig slop, and we all walked out of the theater feeling like we’d just been spiritually waterboarded by a Viking shaman. But apparently, Robert Eggers—the patron saint of “I bet you’d like this movie if you had a lobotomy and a degree in Anglo-Saxon linguistics”—has decided that we didn’t suffer enough.
The man who brought us the “cozy” indie hit *The Witch* (aka “The movie where your entire family dies because you’re a horny teenager”) and *The Lighthouse* (aka “Two hours of Willem Dafoe screaming about lobster traps and farts”) is back with a new project. And before you get your hopes up, no, it’s not a buddy comedy about a time-traveling dachshund. It’s a movie about the 1920s, which in Eggers’ world means it’s probably three hours of people whispering about the existential dread of owning a radio.
The project, currently titled *Werk ohne Autor* (just kidding, it’s actually just called *The Northman 2: Beard Harder*), is reportedly an adaptation of a 10th-century Icelandic saga about a guy who kills his cousin over a sheep. But wait—there’s a twist. The sheep wasn’t even real. It was a metaphor. For colonialism. Or something. I don’t know, I fell asleep during the press release.
Here’s the thing about Robert Eggers: the man has never met a historical detail he didn’t want to bludgeon you over the head with. His movies are less “films” and more “immersive historical reenactments that you paid $18 to watch while eating popcorn that costs more than your rent.” The guy probably insisted that the sheep in his new movie be historically accurate, meaning it had to be a specific breed of sheep that went extinct in 1423, and he probably made the actor who plays the sheep train for six months to learn how to bleat in Old Norse.
And you know what? The internet is going to eat this up. Reddit is already frothing at the mouth. The r/TrueFilm crowd is sharpening their knives, ready to write 10,000-word essays about how the sound design on the second act—where the protagonist stares at a rock for 45 minutes—is a “meditation on the futility of ambition.” Meanwhile, the rest of us are just wondering why we can’t get a movie where a guy fights a bear with his bare hands without also having to sit through a 20-minute scene of him churning butter.
But let’s be real: we all know why Eggers makes these movies. He’s not interested in telling a story. He’s interested in creating a vibe. A vibe that says, “You are a small, insignificant creature in a cold, indifferent universe, and also, your leather boots are historically inaccurate.” Every frame of his films is drenched in this oppressive, wet-blanket atmosphere that makes you feel like you’re trapped in a museum diorama with a serial killer.
And honestly? That’s kind of amazing. Eggers is the only director working today who can make a scene of a guy eating a bowl of porridge feel like a descent into madness. The guy is basically David Lynch if David Lynch had a crippling obsession with 17th-century maritime law. You go into an Eggers movie knowing you’re going to come out the other side feeling like you just survived a 19th-century cholera outbreak, but you can’t stop watching because the cinematography is so good it makes you want to cry.
The new movie, which is apparently based on a real 1920s serial killer or a ghost ship or a guy who invented the toaster oven (I’m not reading the full synopsis, I have a life), is already being hyped as “Eggers’ most accessible film yet.” Which is rich, because his “most accessible” film is *The Witch*, a movie where a family slowly starves to death in a forest while a goat named Black Phillip tells a teenage girl to sign her soul over to Satan. That’s his “fun” movie.
But here’s the real question: Is this the movie that finally breaks Eggers into the mainstream? Will your uncle who only watches *Fast & Furious* movies finally sit down and appreciate a 40-minute shot of a candle burning down to the wick? Probably not. But he might watch it on a plane, get confused, and then spend the rest of the flight Googling “what is the deal with the lighthouse.”
The truth is, Eggers doesn’t need to be mainstream. He’s already achieved a level of cult status that most directors would kill for. He’s the guy who makes movies that feel like they were carved out of stone by a very angry monk. Every frame is a painting. Every line of dialogue sounds like it was translated from a language that has 47 words for “despair.”
So yeah, I’m going to see his new movie. I’m going to buy my ticket. I’m going to sit in the dark theater and let him drag me through 180 minutes of emotional torture. And I’m going to leave the theater feeling like I just ran a marathon through a peat bog. But you know what? At least the costumes will be historically accurate. And honestly, that’s more than I can say for most movies these days.
Final Thoughts
Robert Eggers has carved out a singular space in modern cinema by treating period authenticity not as a backdrop, but as a living, breathing antagonist—his characters are always trapped in the suffocating rigor of their own history. While some might dismiss his meticulousness as stylistic fetishism, I’d argue his real gift is in using that precision to strip away our modern comforts, forcing us to confront the raw, irrational terrors that our ancestors actually believed in. Ultimately, Eggers reminds us that the most profound horror isn’t a monster in the dark, but the terrifying realization that our ancestors were just as intelligent and desperate as we are, only with far fewer answers.