Valhalla Rising

Nicholas Winding Refn is the puckish Danish director behind the Pusher trilogy and last year's UK-set criminal burlesque, Bronson. With Valhalla Rising, he loses his bearings in the fog of dark-ages Europe; beguiled by barren landscapes and lowering clouds as the brooding visuals stand in for a story. Mads Mikkelsen is the unnamed, unspeaking killing machine who finds himself beset by pagans before hooking up with a band of Christian converts en route to Palestine. Then the mist rolls in and the longboat runs aground on a distant shore that may be the New World, or some hell of Refn's own devising. Valhalla Rising amounts to a series of poses; a stage-managed storm. I'm not sure there's much going on behind this blank, brutish surface, but it's undeniably distinctive and packs a certain primitive punch.