Ruptured Review: Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America

Country of origin- USA
Year of release- 2007 
Director- Tony Stone 
Stars- Fiore Tedesco, Tony Stone, David Perry

The film begins with a passage of text which explains some background to the story we are about to see. It says that in 1007 AD a Viking expedition from Greenland travelled west in search of new lands (North America). They eventually arrived at Leifsbudir, and then finding the land was barren and desolate travelled down the coast to Vinland, where they set up camp and send out two pathfinders into the forest. Soon after this, the landing party falls foul of the Skraelings (natives) and many are killed leaving the rest to flee in the boat assuming the pathfinders are dead, however they are not.

The film then begins and the first thing we see is the two pathfinders, Orn and Volnard and some very annoying shaky-cam that nearly gave me an aneurism. The two pathfinders find their dead comrades and the boat gone, and decide to head further into the forest so they are less exposed to any potential Skraelings. Once in the forest, Chapter 1- Stranded begins, and yes in case you were wondering this is indeed the kind of film that is divide into chapters, which immediately rings alarm bells of pretentiousness for me. After building a shelter, which is done in what feels like real time, the two begin to hunt for food. The next day we are greeted to some actual unstimulated woodland shitting from one of the pathfinders, because that’s what this film really needed. After what feels like a further ten hours, the pathfinders find a small log cabin inhabited by two monks and proceed to kill one of them, and soon after this we see a real chicken beheading, which is completely unneeded and pretty unpleasant. It is at this point in the film that the two pathfinders begin to follow separate paths, one beginning a spiritual quest with the surviving monk, and the other slowly reverting to a more primal state.

This film had a great deal of potential to create a beautiful, dark, charismatic and intelligent classical Norse saga. However, it failed in this task, and instead created a boring film with one dimensional characters portrayed by below average actors and a pretentious and paper thin plot that would fail to hold the attention of even the most invested cinema enthusiast. The film also suffered the sadly inescapable problem of having a very low budget, and the slightly more escapable issue of piss poor cinematography that would be at times baffling and at others sickening. This film did have one very strong redeeming feature, and that was its soundtrack, which was comprised of mostly atmospheric and raw black metal from such bands as Burzum and Dimmu Borgir which were often well suited to the bleak forest landscape that was the film’s setting. This brings me to my conclusion that this film is essentially a string of sub-par black metal music videos that have been strung together by an ostentatious director to created what I have seen described as a “visual poem”, but what is in actuality a dull ego trip for a black metal fan. If you want to see a film that is similar to this but actually good, I recommend Valhalla Rising as it explores many of the concepts that flew over this films head in a much darker and more innovative way. Severed Ways gets a 3/10 from me, I can’t really recommend it, just listen to its soundtrack.