The Last Viking

The Ballad of Broken Brothers

There is a specific frequency of laughter that only Anders Thomas Jensen can elicit—a sound that sits uncomfortably between a guffaw and a sob. For over two decades, the Danish auteur has carved out a niche that defies the sleek, exportable "Nordic Noir" brand. His cinema is not about cool detectives in wool sweaters; it is about the grotesque, the damaged, and the profoundly weird. In *The Last Viking* (2025), Jensen returns to his favorite sandbox: the dysfunctonal brotherhood of men who are too broken to function in society, yet too stubbornly alive to give up. It is a film that asks us to find the divine in the delusional.



Visually, Jensen operates in a realm of heightened reality that feels like a fairy tale gone wrong. The film opens not with grit, but with a painterly, animated prologue of Nordic warriors—mythic, stoic, and sacrificial. It is a stark, almost cruel contrast to the film’s actual "warriors": Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), a freshly released convict with a short fuse, and his brother Manfred (Mads Mikkelsen). The transition from the animated valhalla to the drab, beige corridors of the psychiatric ward where Anker collects Manfred is jarring by design. Jensen frames the modern world as a suffocating place that lacks the logic of myth, forcing his characters to retreat into their own fabricated realities.

The heart of the film beats in the chest of Manfred, played by Mikkelsen with a commitment that dissolves his Hollywood star persona entirely. Clad in a catastrophic perm and wire-rimmed glasses, Manfred has dissociated from his trauma so thoroughly that he believes he is John Lennon. This is not played for cheap mockery, but rather treated as a fragile survival mechanism. When he insists on being called "John," it is a plea for dignity. Mikkelsen’s physical comedy here is Chaplin-esque but laced with panic; his recurring tendency to throw himself out of moving windows when reality intrudes is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking. It is a visual metaphor for the flight reflex of a wounded child trapped in a grown man's body.



The narrative engine—a quest to find stolen loot buried near their childhood home—is merely a clothesline on which Jensen hangs his study of trauma. The brothers return to their old house, now an Airbnb run by a bickering couple (Sofie Gråbøl and Søren Malling) who are just as eccentric as their guests. Jensen’s genius lies in his refusal to pathologize his characters. In the world of *The Last Viking*, sanity is relative. The "normal" people are often cruel and rigid, while the "insane" characters, including a group of patients who round out Manfred's "Beatles" cover band, possess a purity of spirit that the real world has lost.

The film does stumble occasionally under its own eccentricity; the mid-section meanders, and the violence, sudden and brutal in typical Jensen fashion, threatens to curdle the film’s sweet center. Yet, the director pulls it back with moments of quiet devastation. Watching Lie Kaas’s Anker—the "sane" brother—slowly realize that protecting Manfred’s delusion is an act of love, rather than enabling, provides the film's emotional anchor.



Ultimately, *The Last Viking* may not reach the perfect theological symmetry of Jensen’s masterpiece *Adam’s Apples*, but it shares that film’s profound humanism. It is a messy, loud, and violent film about the quiet work of forgiveness. Jensen suggests that if the world refuses to be a fairy tale, we have every right to write our own, even if it means pretending to be a Beatle in a Danish forest. It is a chaotic symphony of the broken, and it is beautiful to behold.