War of the Kingdoms

Mud, Myth, and the Space Between

I keep thinking about the dirt under Hagen’s fingernails. There's a lot of dirt in *War of the Kingdoms*, Cyrill Boss and Philipp Stennert’s six-part reimagining of the Nibelungenlied, and it serves a distinct purpose. We're so used to seeing medieval fantasy rendered as clean, weightless digital spectacle that the sheer tactile grunge of this series feels like a shock to the system. You can practically smell the damp wool and the iron. (I’ve sat through enough sterile fantasy epics lately to know when a production actually bothered to drag its cast through real mud.) Here, the kingdom of Burgundy isn't a shining citadel. It's a wet, exhausted stronghold held together by one man's increasingly strained sense of duty.



Boss and Stennert, who previously proved their knack for atmospheric tension with the crime series *Pagan Peak*, have stated their goal was to find "the exact point where history becomes myth." They mostly succeed. By anchoring Wolfgang Hohlbein’s 1986 revisionist novel in the physical landscapes of Iceland and the Czech Republic, they strip the magic of its glamour.

Gijs Naber plays Hagen von Tronje not as a glowering villain, but as a middle manager of a failing state. The Dutch actor carries the entire physical weight of the production in his shoulders. Watch him in the scene where he first receives reports of the advancing Huns. His jaw barely tightens. His hands, resting on the table, perform a minute choreography of suppression—fingers tapping a steady, anxious rhythm before curling into a rigid fist. Naber understands that Hagen’s tragedy isn't his forbidden love for Princess Kriemhild (Lilja van der Zwaag), but his complete inability to exist outside the rigid box of his own loyalty.



Then there's Jannis Niewöhner as Siegfried. If Hagen is a heavy stone sinking in water, Siegfried is a spark in a dry barn. Niewöhner plays the legendary dragon slayer with the terrifying confidence of a trust-fund kid who just bought a broadsword. He bounds into the court at Worms with an arrogance that completely destabilizes the solemn, paranoid energy of King Gunter’s (Dominic Marcus Singer) reign. The contrast between Naber’s stiff, practiced movements and Niewöhner’s loose, predatory swagger tells you everything you need to know about their fatal dynamic before anyone even draws a weapon.

I’m not fully sure the script always trusts its actors as much as it should. There are moments in the middle episodes—especially during the convoluted negotiations to secure the Valkyrie Brunhild (Rosalinde Mynster) as Gunter's bride—where the dialogue starts explaining the political stakes that the camera has already made perfectly clear. Characters state their motivations out loud when a simple, guarded glance across a banquet hall would have done the job. It drags the pacing down just when the tension ought to be tightening.



Yet the series recovers whenever it returns to its central thesis: heroism is a disruptive, dangerous thing. There's a deeply unsettling sequence in the fourth episode where Siegfried and Kriemhild wander through an ancient, enchanted forest. The sound design drops out completely, leaving only the crunch of dead leaves and the low, resonant thrum of something ancient waking up beneath the soil. It feels less like a fantasy adventure and more like a horror film. You realize, in that quiet stretch, that these people are playing a game with forces that will inevitably crush them. *War of the Kingdoms* doesn't reinvent the sword-and-sorcery genre. But it does ground it in a deeply human kind of exhaustion, leaving a metallic taste in your mouth long after the credits roll.