THE LAST VIKING
There’s something of Preston Sturges or the Coen Brothers to Jensen's screwball tale of sibling reconciliation
Directed by: Anders Thomas Jensen
Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Sofie Gråbøl
Certificate: TBC
Released: 26 June 2026
Rating: 9/10
If you know the name Anders Thomas Jensen, it may be as the hardest working screenwriter in Denmark. Over the past 25 years he’s racked up over 60 credits, scripting Dogme rom-coms (Mifune, 1999), Oscar-winning melodramas (In A Better World, 2010) and brutal 18th century westerns (The Promised Land, 2023). But this obscures a fact the Danes have mostly kept to themselves: he’s also one of the most brilliant, blackly comic directors working in world cinema today.
The Last Viking is his sixth film, reuniting the magnificent repertory company that have stuck by him since 2000’s Flickering Lights. Nikolaj Lie Kaas is Anker, a hard-boiled thug with a short-fuse, newly released from a 15-year stretch for bank robbery. Mads Mikkelsen is his brother Manfred, a damaged, dissociative dreamer. Sofie Gråbøl is Margrethe, their long-suffering sister, struggling to maintain some domestic peace. And Nicolas Bro is Flemming, a menacing handyman who comes looking for the missing millions.
The money was buried by Manfred near the family’s childhood home, deep in a fairytale forest, 15 years ago. Inconveniently, over time, his sense of personal identity has been so shaken he now sincerely believes himself to be John Lennon and has no memory of the location. Anker is persuaded by a maverick psychotherapist to humour his brother, match him with patients who believe themselves to be Paul, George and Ringo, and head back home, in the belief that by reuniting the band, Manfred/John will be able to play out his trauma, psychedelically reintegrate and rediscover the site of the buried treasure.
In précis this may sound convoluted, contrived and in extremely poor taste. In practice, such is Jensen’s compassion for his cast of traumatised misfits, and so compelling are the performances (Mikkelsen particularly, playing hard against type in a stringy blonde perm and specs), you can’t help but be enchanted. There’s something of Preston Sturges, or the Coen Brothers at their finest, to the drama, which miraculously marries screwball slapstick, gangster gore and Nordic myth to create a genuinely heart-warming story of family reconciliation. As if that weren’t enough, the film also features the finest performance of an ABBA song in recent cinema.
