Review: 'The Northman' is a brawny, beguiling mix of gory action and mystical sorcery in the days of the Vikings.

Like the muscular fighter and the seductive sorceress at its heart, Robert Eggers’ “The Northman” besieges and bewitches the viewer in equal measure with its realistically bloody and enthrallingly haunted view of life among the Vikings.

It’s near the end of the 10th century C.E., and a Viking castle is awaiting the return of King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) and his cohort from their latest battles. The queen, Gudrun (Nicole Kidman), prepares for the king’s arrival, as is their teen son, Amleth (Oscar Novak). Aurvandil takes Amleth on a vision quest — involving a steam hut, psychedelics and the leering jester, Helmir (Willem Dafoe) — that’s the first step of the lad’s eventual ascension to his dad’s throne.

But Arvandil’s brother, Fjölnir (Danish actor Claes Bang), has other ideas. He leads a group of soldiers to assassinate the king, kidnap Gudrun, and declare himself the new king. The only mistake Fjölnir makes is letting Amleth get away. The lad rows a small boat out to sea, with three vows on his lips: “I will avenge you, Father. I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir.”

Years pass, and Amleth — played as a strapping adult by Alexander Skarsgård — is still reciting those vows, but as a soldier in a mercenary army. After his group pillages a village, he rescues a Slavic maiden, Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), from getting killed in the melee. When he hears Olga is being shipped off with some newly enslaved villagers to Iceland, where Fjölnir now lives, Amleth becomes a slave himself to join the voyage and finally exact his revenge.

In Iceland, Amleth discovers Fjölnir has already lost Aurvandil’s kingdom, and the new settlement he leads is managed through fear by Fjölnir’s sniveling prince, Thórir (Gustav Lindh), who looks like a Dark Ages version of Jared Kushner. Amleth works cautiously at first, scoping out Fjölnir’s new kingdom before taking it down. Amleth also teams with Olga, who is as ruthless as he is. “Your strength breaks men’s bones,” Olga tells Amleth, adding, “I have the cunning to break their minds.”

Eggers — as he did in his first two films, “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” — creates a world where harsh reality and mysticism live side by side. In long, fluid takes, Eggers captures the unrelenting violence of marauders ransacking villages and slaughtering the locals. But the script, which Eggers wrote with the Icelandic writer Sjón (“Lamb”), also leaves room for psychedelic spirit journeys, visits with vision-seeing priestesses (one of them played by Björk), and the influence of dreams on Amleth’s gory reality.

Taylor-Joy, following her run that included “The Queen’s Gambit” and “Last Night in Soho,” continues to be one of the most fascinating young stars to watch. Kidman makes the most out of her one surprising moment, and Bang (“The Square,” “The Burnt Orange Heresy”) brings a weary menace to the traitorous Fjölnir.

But “The Northman” forces all eyes toward Skarsgård, who presents Amleth as a brawny, brooding hero who must learn that the childhood ideas of vengeance must inevitably yield to the adult reality that many things are not what they appear to be. 

Fans of “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse,” low-budget movies that orchestrated an atmosphere of dread, were going to be curious what Eggers could do on a larger scale. What he’s created is an authentic-looking and dream-filled world of a thousand years ago, sometimes beautiful and often brutal — but always fascinating.

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‘The Northman’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 22, in theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violence, some sexual content and nudity. Running time: 136 minutes.