The Last Viking

Mads Mikkelsen (also at this year’s Festival in Dust Bunny) has done many strange things in the films of Anders Thomas Jensen over the course of the Danish star’s three-decade collaboration with the director. Even so, adopting a remarkably unflattering hairstyle to play a man who believes he’s John Lennon points to the degree of commitment he brings to the latest of Jensen’s dark, sometimes grisly, and reliably outrageous comedies.

A film that rates as all of the above, The Last Viking also reteams Mikkelsen with several other actors who are always up for Jensen’s brand of mayhem, including Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Mikkelsen’s co-star in the 2015 Festival feature Men & Chicken and the 2020 international hit Riders of Justice. Here they play Anker and Manfred, brothers who are reunited after Anker’s years-long jail stint for a bank robbery. Since Manfred is the only one who knows where the loot is buried, Anker has no choice but to contend not only with his brother’s many psychological issues but the legacy of the traumas they suffered in their childhood.

Of course, this being an Anders Thomas Jensen movie, the brothers are just two members of a highly memorable gallery of misfits, miscreants, and many other unique individuals with their own foibles and fixations, one of which may involve re-forming the most famous pop band ever. Yet for all of this tale’s outlandish, hilarious, and sometimes violent events, the empathy that Jensen elicits for his characters makes his film as warm-hearted as it is unpredictable.

JASON ANDERSON

Content advisory: violence, accident trauma, depiction of attempted suicide, coarse language, mature themes