It's a weird film. Imagine Aguirre, Wrath of God, along with the Heart of Darkness bits of Apocalypse Now, crossed with Kirk Douglas' The Vikings, all set in remote and freezing Scotland (and Newfoundland) and you're some way there.
It's very, very violent. We must believe that around 1000AD people had extremely brutish lives while the economy consisted entirely of earning money through gambling on gladiator-style fights.
Quaint customs of the real Vikings included the Blood Eagle: the chief of the people you had just defeated in battle was tied-up naked and spread eagled. While he was still alive he was then split open from throat to groin, the ribs cracked apart and splayed outwards, and his innards pulled out and arranged decoratively around. Today we'd call that psychopathy, but in those days it was good clean fun.
They do some of that in this film, too (but without the nakedness, obviously. That would be yukky).
Director Nicolas Winding Refn has created some sort of mad, science-fiction-style film (it reminded me (very briefly) of The Draughtsman's Contract -- that was a vastly better film, but one in which we are continually aware that the seventeenth century is a very alien place indeed). Here's the director, fannying around with his super-zoom:
I hated the films for which he first became famous (the Danish Pusher trilogy, about drug dealers and violence and sordid happenings), but I loved -- loved! -- his extraordinary bio-pic of, er, psychopathic criminal Charles Bronson, in which lovely (and tiny winkied) actor Tom Hardy brilliantly plays Bronson.
Yeah, whichever way you look at it, 1 out of 5 isn't a great success rate.
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