Severed Ways

Severed Ways

109 Minutes

A sloppy exploration of very early American history, Severed Ways delves into a largely unexplored time period in an even less commonly imagined setting, dropping two stranded Vikings in the primeval 11th century forests of the New World and following them, languidly and with a resolutely loose hand, as they struggle to get home. This type of journey is, of course, rife with potentially silly connotations, from latent medieval warrior fetishism to the general pitfalls of a low budget project aiming for epic heights. In a clumsily ambivalent gesture, director Tony Stone simultaneously embraces and rails against these conventions, steeping his film in an almost grueling sense of realistic minutiae while frittering away those earned points with a borderline ridiculous black metal score and dumb, winking gestures – like an inexplicable shot of one of the Vikings, standing atop a fallen tree stump, banging his head along with the soundtrack.

Although a big part of the film’s ethos, the soundtrack itself is not the problem. The concept of a Viking movie scored by Dimmu Borgir and Morbid Angel holds promise as a potentially knowing examination of the mythos around these Scandinavian warriors. But Severed Ways instead devotes itself so unsparingly to realism – working in close details and containing almost no action – that the use of this kind of backing pushes things dangerously close to LARPing territory and defies the serious angle it works so hard to build. There are countless embarrassing metal videos that prove the danger of grown men dabbling in sword and armor dress up, and this one mostly saves itself from the cringe inducing depths of a Manowar video by more closely resembling a Saturday morning fishing show. Shot handheld and with an atrocious eye for any type of movement, it’s all the film can do not to make its lush forest settings look ugly.

There is a definite aspiration to Herzog-level heights, from the cribbing of Popul Vuh to the “struggle in the face of impossible odds” concept. But the impossible odds that these two warriors face end up as a sideline to a loosely plotted romp in the woods, with one running off to trade dewy stares with an Irish monk and the other systematically destroying everything he comes across. This fumbled storyline, which makes up the entire second act, follows the gentler Viking as he attempts to atone for his sins by running off and converting to Christianity, a decision propelled by guilt over his sister’s suicide back in Norway. This is revealed in flashback, a tenuous motivational device that feels as badly handled as the quickly glossed-over reunion the two companions later share. As the story progresses, the hysterical attention to detail and slow pace (at first seeming like indications of carefully observant direction) end up revealing an inability to parse action, leaving us with a fragmented, unsatisfying movie which clings to its uneventfulness as a virtue.

This narrative clumsiness is exacerbated by often unfortunate shot choices, the framing of which often goes beyond strange into the inexplicable. One appears to be shot from inside a characters beard. Another’s use of staggered fades to indicate movement borders on self-parody. Scenes of motion, when they happen, are so nauseatingly shaky that they feel like home video taken by the characters.

There are thankful moments of levity, like one of the Vikings needing assistance after his shirt gets stuck over his head, but as much as this light humor helps, it’s yet another sign of the conflicted aims of Stone’s vision. Severed Ways is both serious and silly, artistically minded and childish, resulting in a mélange of images and ideas that never settle into a real film. Even its most memorable shots, like a burning cross atop a collapsing church, feel entirely hollow, selected for gut impact while never handling the associations that buzz around such an image. The meager message about society’s unending drive to consume nature, typified by a wood chopping motif and one very angry Viking warrior, ends up ranging closer to transparent heavy metal fantasy than anything resembling art.

by Jesse Cataldo