The Last Viking

Written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen, The Last Viking (Den sidste viking) opens on a fairytale: a Viking chieftain decrees that every one of his subjects must lose their left arm, so that all may live as equals. That grotesque little parable hangs over everything that follows.

In the present, Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) walks out of prison after fourteen years served for armed robbery. Before going inside, he handed the stolen money to his brother Manfred (Mads Mikkelsen) with one instruction: bury it, and remember where. Manfred, who is mentally ill, is the only living person who knows the hiding place — and he can no longer recall it. What begins as a straightforward reclamation job turns into a road trip through the brothers' shared past, out to the remote house where they grew up.

Jensen's film keeps swerving away from the genre it appears to belong to. A psychiatrist's therapeutic scheme, a pair of strangers now running the family home as an Airbnb, and Manfred's own unshakeable sense of who he is all conspire to turn a heist into something stranger, sadder and far funnier: an argument between two brothers about what one person owes another.

Jensen uses the shape of a crime caper to ask a moral question that has nothing to do with money: what does it cost to make room for someone who does not fit? The opening fable of the chieftain who amputates the population into equality is the film's thesis stated as absurdist horror — equality enforced by subtraction, by cutting people down to a common size.

Against that, the film offers Manfred, a man whose reality is not negotiable and whose identity cannot be argued away. The buried money is a MacGuffin in the purest sense: the brothers spend the film searching for a suitcase, and what they actually excavate is buried baggage — grief, blame, and the unspoken contract of who was looked after and who was left to carry it.

The message is not that love heals illness. It is that accommodation is the real work of family: you either enter the other person's world or you spend your life resenting them for not entering yours. Jensen, characteristically, refuses to make that lesson sentimental — he delivers it deadpan, with a joke running underneath the ache.

As a crime film that refuses its own genre. One reading takes the setup at face value: the money is real, the search is real, and the film is about how criminal logic collapses when applied to family. Reviewers consistently noted that the expected sequence — return home, find the suitcase, air grievances, escape together — is precisely what does not happen. The heist is a trap set for the audience's expectations.

The Last Viking arrived as a significant domestic event: after its out-of-competition world premiere at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on 30 August 2025 and a screening at the 50th Toronto International Film Festival, it opened in Denmark on 9 October 2025 and became a box-office phenomenon, later taking the Audience Award at the Danish Film Awards — a rare alignment of festival profile and mass popularity.

It also consolidates one of European cinema's most durable creative partnerships. This is the sixth film Anders Thomas Jensen has made with both Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas, extending a body of work — The Green Butchers, Adam's Apples, Men & Chicken, Riders of Justice — in which grotesque comedy is used as a delivery system for questions about grief, faith and damage. Critics placed this film at or near the top of that filmography.

Its most discussed contribution is its handling of disability and neurodivergence. By opening with a fable about a chieftain who amputates his subjects into equality, Jensen puts contemporary debates about accommodation directly on screen, and Mikkelsen's performance was singled out for portraying a mentally ill man with humanity rather than as a comic device. Reviewers described the result as darkly funny and unexpectedly moving — a mainstream Danish hit that argues for making room rather than cutting people down to size.

Overwhelmingly positive, and unusually broad. The film was a box-office phenomenon in Denmark and won the Audience Award at the Danish Film Awards — an endorsement from general audiences rather than only festival crowds. It carries a 7.2 user rating on IMDb.

Most praised: Mads Mikkelsen's performance as Manfred, repeatedly singled out for portraying mental illness with humanity rather than caricature and described by Jensen himself as unlike anything the actor had attempted before. Reviewers also praised the way the comedy amplifies rather than undercuts the drama — the film was widely called darkly funny and bizarrely moving — and the chemistry of the Mikkelsen/Lie Kaas pairing in their sixth film with the director. Several critics ranked it among Jensen's best work.

Points of friction: The film's tonal swerves are deliberate and not to every taste — viewers arriving for a heist comedy encounter a psychiatric drama, a fable about amputation, and a domestic standoff in an Airbnb, and the structure withholds the payoff the setup promises. Its treatment of disability, identity and accommodation is designed to be uncomfortable, which places it inside live cultural debates rather than above them.

Verdict: a rare crowd-pleaser built out of genuinely thorny material — accessible enough to dominate the Danish box office, strange enough to premiere at Venice and Toronto.