I will avenge you, father. I will save you, mother. I will review you, “The Northman.”

Robert Eggers’ “The Northman” is one of the most realistic Viking movies ever made; it’s also one of the best.

A young Prince Amleth (Oscar Novak) witnesses his father’s (Ethan Hawke) death at the hands of his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang), resulting in the prince losing his kingdom and his mother Gudrún (Nicole Kidman). The prince gets recruited by a band of Vikings and trained by a berserker (Alexandar Skarsgård) who plans his revenge on his uncle with the help of Olga of the Birch-Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy).

Primarily set in the early 900s in Iceland, the movie painstakingly recreates the Viking age, transporting the viewer into a brutal and mythical world of Medieval revenge. The production designers worked with multiple Icelandic historians to make everything feel accurate.

Norse myths and folklore, Viking weaponry and ships, village architecture and even the agricultural design of farms were all intricately researched and recreated for the film. As a result, “The Northman” feels like what you would get if you asked a Medieval historian to write the story, which is actually what they did.

Based on Saxo Grammaticus’s account of the Icelandic poem about Amleth, also the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the movie itself mixes and morphs the account to create something wholly new and fresh. Robert Eggers, the director and co-writer, said he enjoys writing as all classic authors at the time did by spicing up the mythic characters with new characteristics.

And all these characters do feel incredibly mythic. None of their culture is watered down for the audience. To the characters, Viking brutality and Norse mythology aren’t legends they learned for fun from media, this is their unquestioned reality.

Valkyries and Valhalla, witchy brews and fatal prophecies; these people are completely detached from our modern perspectives, which just makes them so exciting to watch. Every decapitation and incantation feels like the violently prophetic result of decades of spilled generational blood in the attempt at reaching one place: Valhalla.

From a modern perspective, Amleth’s journey feels futile at times. This man ruins his life and opportunities all for vengeance and hate, but to Amleth, a path without violence and vengeance would be forsaking his fate and his chance in paradise with the armies of Odin.

“The Northman” exposes the brutal extent people will go to for their belief systems and folklore. It makes you think about the types of ironically fatalistic stories people will tell about us 1,000 years from now. How will they perceive our people’s worship of, as one character puts it in the film, “a corpse nailed to a tree?”

Norse culture at the time was defined by a chain of death and misery. With each of Amleth’s rampages, he probably creates decades’ worth of orphan revenge plots. But, the action, cinematography and performances in “The Northman” were so gruesome, thrilling and immersive that I wouldn’t mind watching them all.