Name: The Last Viking
Director: Anders Thomas Jensen
Genre: Comedy, Crime, Drama
Released: 2025-10-30
Duration: 116 min
Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Sofie Gråbøl, Søren Malling, Bodil Jørgensen

A heist needs three things: the money, the plan, and someone who still remembers where it all went. The Last Viking, the new film from Danish writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen, quietly removes the third. The haul from an old bank robbery sits buried somewhere in the Danish woods, and only one man knows the spot. That man no longer believes he is himself.

He is Manfred, played by Mads Mikkelsen, and the breakdown that swallowed his memory has handed him a replacement identity: he is now convinced he is John Lennon. His brother Anker, just released after years inside for the robbery, needs the money and needs Manfred clear-headed long enough to find it. That is the whole machine of the film, and it runs on a single contradiction. The treasure map is a person, and the person has been overwritten.

Handing Mikkelsen the broken brother instead of the competent one is the first real decision the film makes, and it is the right one. He has spent a long stretch of his career as the most controlled face in the frame: the assassin, the chemist, the villain who never blinks. Here he plays a man with no control at all, someone performing a dead rock star because the performance is easier than the grief underneath it. Nikolaj Lie Kaas, as Anker, takes the opposite weight: the lucid brother, the one who has to steer a sibling he can no longer reach, and who needs that broken mind to cough up a map before anyone else gets there first.

Jensen has been making a version of this film for most of his life behind the camera, and The Last Viking belongs to that body of work cleanly. His pictures pair grotesque, near-cartoon premises with men who are quietly coming apart: the butcher who feeds customers something he should not, the brothers in Men & Chicken with a secret in the basement, the widower in Riders of Justice hunting a pattern in a train crash. He builds them around the same small repertory company, Mikkelsen and Lie Kaas at the center, and lets cruelty and slapstick share a frame until they stop feeling separate. The jokes are bleak and the violence lands, but the films are finally about damage and the strange machinery people assemble to keep living with it.

The Beatles conceit is the clearest tell of what he is after. To shake Manfred’s memory loose, the brothers set about reassembling the band, recruiting strangers willing to answer to Paul and Ringo and hoping the ritual jolts something back into place. Played one way it is pure farce; played the way the trailer suggests, it is sadder than that. Manfred can only be reached through the delusion, never around it, and the film seems to understand that the John Lennon act is not the obstacle to the money. It is the wall a grieving man built so he would not have to be Manfred at all.

Jensen is no marginal figure dabbling in genre. He won an Academy Award for a short early on and wrote some of the Danish dramas that carried the country’s cinema abroad, which makes the deliberate smallness of his own directing features feel like a choice rather than a limit. The Last Viking arrives with the festival-circuit pedigree that lets a Danish-language crime comedy travel, and with a lead whose face alone clears customs in most markets. Whether that pedigree converts into the crossover his ensemble pieces have managed before is the open commercial question.

What the film cannot promise in advance is that the joke owns a second act. Almost two hours is a long time to ride a one-line premise, and Jensen’s tonal blend of heist farce, mental illness and fraternal grief has gone sour before in weaker hands than his. The trailer sells the gag; the harder question is whether there is a real disorder being dramatized or just a costume Mikkelsen gets to wear. A man who thinks he is John Lennon is funny exactly until the film has to decide whether Manfred is a person or a punchline, and everything good or bad about the picture will turn on that choice.

Alongside Mikkelsen and Lie Kaas, the ensemble includes Sofie Gråbøl as Margrethe, Søren Malling as Werner and Bodil Jørgensen as Freja. Jensen wrote and directed, working again in the register of comedy, crime and drama folded into one another that has defined his run as a filmmaker. The genre billing reads light; the company assembled to play it does not.

The Last Viking runs 116 minutes. It opened in Denmark last autumn and has rolled out across Europe through the winter and spring, and it reaches UK cinemas on 26 June, following a US theatrical release last autumn.