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, reunites him with the repertory company of actors who have anchored that cinema, chief among them Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas.

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

On home turf the film was a phenomenon, opening to record admissions and drawing a clutch of Danish award nominations, while Mikkelsen earned a European Film Award nomination for European Actor. For viewers who know Jensen only through Riders of Justice, it confirms the register he has made his own — slapstick and grief held in the same frame, the joke and the ache indistinguishable.