Valhalla Rising

Valhalla Rising (2009) is Nicolas Winding Refn's grim Viking fantasy, and you can watch online on iFILM. Mads Mikkelsen plays a mute, one-eyed warrior who has spent years caged and forced to fight for the entertainment of Norse chieftains.

He breaks free with the help of a boy slave and falls in with a band of Christian Vikings sailing for Jerusalem. An endless fog swallows their ship, and the shore they finally reach is nothing the crew was promised. Refn strips out almost all dialogue and builds the film from landscape, blood and long silences, splitting it into chapters with ominous titles. It is slow, brutal and hallucinatory, closer to a fever dream than a standard action saga. Shot in the Scottish highlands, the cold practically seeps off the screen. Stream Valhalla Rising (2009) online on iFILM.