The Last Viking

Anders Thomas Jensen has spent two decades building one of the most distinctive bodies of work in Danish cinema, a run of pitch-black comedies (The Green Butchers, Adam's Apples, Men & Chicken, Riders of Justice) in which damaged men collide with absurd logic and unexpected tenderness. The Last Viking, which premiered out of competition at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, brings back the repertory company of actors who have carried that cinema, Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas above all.

The setup is pure Jensen. Anker (Lie Kaas) leaves prison expecting to claim the spoils of an old heist and finds that his brother Manfred (Mikkelsen) has lost the memory of where the money is hidden and, it seems, his grip on who he is: he has decided, with total conviction, that he is John Lennon. Mikkelsen plays the delusion straight-faced and wounded, and the comedy comes out of the brothers' impossible negotiation far more than out of gags. Jensen's regulars Sofie Gråbøl, Søren Malling and Bodil Jørgensen fill out a typically eccentric supporting ensemble.

At home the film was a phenomenon, opening to record admissions and drawing a clutch of Danish award nominations, and Mikkelsen earned a European Film Award nomination for European Actor. Viewers who know Jensen only through Riders of Justice will find the register he has made his own, slapstick and grief held in the same frame, where it is often impossible to tell the joke from the ache.