10 Movies Where God Intervenes

Something of a hump film for Nicolas Winding Refn, Valhalla Rising separates the director's raw, European crime films (Pusher, Bronson) from the ultra-stylish US pictures (Drive, Neon Demon) that made him an international star. An oddity belonging more to the former camp, but not wholly to either, the movie features Mads Mikkelsen as One-Eye, a twelfth-century Norse warrior who travels from Sutherland with a band of Christian Norsemen in an attempt to locate the fabled Holy Land. 

What the gang find instead is an unidentified world of pain, where brutality and misery reign. Nevertheless, One-Eye is granted visions and strength by his gods, allowing him to break away from the Christians and repeatedly avoid certain death.

But it's not a Nicolas Winding Refn film if the hero doesn't either end up in a precarious predicament or dead, and for Valhalla Rising, it's the latter. Like Obi-Wan, One-Eye allows himself to be struck down so that he can become more powerful than we could ever imagine. Treated to a spot of ascension by his Norse gods, in recognition of his strife and efforts, the cyclopean hero gets what he's due in the end.