Mads Mikkelsen gives a wonderfully dry, gently heartbreaking performance as Manfred, a man who insists he is John Lennon and demands to be addressed as “John.” Call him Manfred and he will fling himself from a moving car or swan-dive through a window. By the end he is a patchwork of cuts and bruises, yet somehow indestructible. The gag is absurd, but in Mikkelsen’s hands it becomes graceful, funny without cruelty and strangely moving.
The film is the latest from Anders Thomas Jensen, the mischief-maker behind Riders of Justice (2020) and Men & Chicken (2015). He is playing with volatile elements again: a pitch-black comedy that is also a heist, punctuated by bursts of bloodshed and bits of knockabout farce. On paper the tones should collide; on screen, Jensen steers them with a sure, unshowy hand. The choice to populate the story with characters who carry psychiatric diagnoses could have turned ugly, but the film’s gaze is warm and accepting. The joke is never on their condition, it is on the rest of us.
Mikkelsen reunites with Nikolaj Lie Kaas as brothers bound by a knotty past. In a brisk prologue, Anker (Kaas) pulls a robbery, hides the cash, and hands Manfred a key with instructions to stash it where they celebrated childhood birthdays. Cut to fifteen years later: Anker is paroled, Manfred is living as Lennon, and the key’s hiding place is a mystery he refuses to crack.
Their quest leads to their old family home, now an Airbnb owned by Margrethe (Sofie Gråbøl) and Werner (Søren Malling), a magnificently bickering duo. Margrethe is certain, against all evidence, that Anker is flirting with her. Anker prowls the nearby woods “hunting worms” while lugging a metal detector. The pastoral calm of the setting rubs amusingly against the human chaos spiraling through it.
Enter Lothar (Lars Brygmann), the doctor who treated Manfred after his latest leap and diagnosed dissociative identity disorder. He arrives with two released patients and a plan so deluded it just might work: form a Beatles cover band to nudge Manfred back to himself. Jensen plays these scenes with a light touch that never belittles anyone; the film’s quiet thesis is that normality is a myth and eccentricity is universal.
Performance is everything in a tonal high-wire act like this, and Mikkelsen is immaculate. Beneath the goofy curls and rigid posture is a man fiercely loyal to his brother, drawn not as a joke but as a person with dignity and will. Kaas threads a tricky needle as Anker, often harsh, occasionally cruel, yet transparently protective. He refuses to believe Manfred’s delusion is real, but his ferocity comes from love, not disdain.
Trouble finds them, of course. Criminals sniffing around for the stolen money muscle their way into the story and bring violence that slides into place without rupturing the film’s rhythm. Bodil Jørgensen’s Freja, their sister, seems fragile at first, then reveals iron. The movie keeps earning its shifts.
Between the slapstick and the skirmishes, Jensen drops in childhood flashbacks: a small boy who thought he was a Viking, helmet and all; runes carved into the property; memories that darken as they accumulate. Each return to the past deepens the present, sharpening the film’s through-line about loyalty and the lengths family will go to protect its own.
Bookending the main plot is an animated fable about a king whose son loses an arm; the king orders the entire kingdom to do the same so the weakest will not be alone. It is a perplexing prologue that gains force by the end, when its source and meaning land with quiet resonance.
In the end, The Last Viking is a cracked mirror of a love story, two brothers navigating delusion, danger, and decades-old hurt. It is gleeful and bruising, weird and welcoming, and, thanks to Jensen’s precision and Mikkelsen’s exquisitely calibrated turn, unexpectedly tender.