Dir: Anders Thomas Jensen (Denmark/Sweden 2025)
Reviewed by Ian Long
Should we alter ourselves to fit the expectations of others, ormake them change to suit our quirks – no matter how extreme? This question is raised at the beginning of Anders Thomas Jensen’s The Last Viking, a film which revels in its gallery of very quirky people.
Career criminal Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is on the run from the cops after a massive bank robbery. Just before his arrest, he stashes the stolen millions in a safety deposit box and gives the key to his elder brother Manfred, with instructions to hide the loot in the grounds of their childhood home.
The brothers couldn’t be more different: Anker is a tough, glowering hoodlum, while distant, introverted Manfred, convincingly played by a barely-recognisable Mads Mikkelsen, suffers from some as-yet-unspecified psychological disorder. Prone to a variety of obsessions and compulsions, he is cared for by their sister Freya (Bodil Jørgensen).
Anker is released from prison fifteen years after the bank joband reconnects with his siblings, hoping to retrieve the money.But there are complicating factors. In the interim, Manfred has received a specific psychiatric diagnosis (dissociative identity disorder). He now believes that he is John Lennon, and reacts with (mostly self-directed) violence when people don’t use his new name – something which Anker seems completely incapable of doing.
Compounding this, Anker’s accomplice in the robbery, the monstrous, bearlike Flemming, bursts onto the scene in a blaze of threats and violence. Having spent his own share of the booty, he now wants to get his paws on Anker’s cut.
Following the money, Anker drives Manfred/John to their childhood home, now an Airbnb run by a dysfunctional married couple. But he’s unaware that a deeply repressed memory is also waiting to be unearthed there, with implications for all three siblings – or that an earlier stray remark of his will play out with a deranged ‘Beatles reunion’ engineered by a suspiciously eccentric psychiatrist.
Jensen’s film is infused with a brutal black humour which subjects human beings to things usually reserved for cartoon characters (diving from moving vehicles, jumping from third floor windows, being attached to wooden surfaces with nail guns), and the film is aptly bookended by beautifully-wrought animated sequences which cast an ironic eye on the story and its themes.
With his black, brilliantined hair and dark suit (initially immaculate, increasingly ripped and stained as the mayhem unfolds), Nikolaj Lie Kaas’s Anker looks like a gangster from40s Film Noir, and his lopsided scowl lends him a more-than-passing resemblance to Humphrey Bogart, albeit a Bogartwith a constant air of resentful bafflement.
Ealing comedies like The Ladykillers, Whisky Galore and Kind Hearts and Coronets often adopted an indulgently non-judgmental attitude to the amoral capers of their characters, inviting us to focus on their fun sides, not their sociopathy.The Last Viking has a lot of this, albeit infused with a gleeful, pumped-up, Tarantino-esque sadism. In a world where everyone is more than a bit crazy, Anker and Flemming’s greed is ultimately just another peculiarity, no less odd than all the others.
Towards its end the film becomes a tad sentimental, straining some of the characterisations (although the final animated segment answers the story’s initial question in a gruesomely unanticipated way). I’d have preferred it to stick to its antisocial guns, with less effort to tie up the narrative threads, but The Last Viking is still a handsomely-made guilty pleasure, full of wild, unexpected twists that will keep you watching, laughing, and occasionally hiding your eyes.
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