“The confidently cosmopolitan Danish writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn first escorted us through the bloodstained, vomit-splattered, drug-polluted back streets of a Copenhagen omitted from guided tours for Hans Christian Andersen fans. He then took us to meet Britain’s most dangerous criminal, Charles Bronson, in the rigorously guarded wings of Rampton and Broadmoor. His latest movie continues this unremittingly gloomy odyssey in the middle ages when, as Thomas Hobbes put it, the life of man was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. A silent, speechless, one-eyed prisoner (baleful Danish star Mads Mikkelsen) escapes from his pagan captors and falls into the company of a party of Christian Vikings (all played by Scots) about to embark on a crusade. Unsure whether One-Eye is a visitor from heaven or hell, they take him with them on their longship across a misty sea…”
