If screwball noir is a subgenre (encompassing Something Wild, Fargo, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Wild at Heart, After Hours), then Anders Thomas Jensen is its Danish proponent. The Last Viking is a highwire act in which throwaway comic barbs delivered at a clip are interrupted by brutal violence, ostensibly with the aim of keeping the audience ricocheting between laughs and gasps. Whether it works here is another question, but it looks like the cast, most of whom have worked with Jensen before and will be familiar to fans of Scandinavian cinema, were having a very good time making the film.
Nikolaj Lie Kaas plays Anker, a bank robber just released from a 15-year stretch. Before he went down, he forced his brother Manfred into burying a suitcase full of loot. Now free, Anker wants to dig it up, but Manfred isn’t the easiest sibling to deal with. Played by Mads Mikkelsen, it’s hard to diagnose what exactly is adrift with Manfred; some of his behaviour (meltdowns and an inability to speak tactfully) combined with his physical awkwardness indicate that Mikkelsen is playing him as neurodivergent and intellectually disabled. As a vulnerable adult, he is dependent on his sister Freja (Bodil Jørgensen) for care and support.
We’re invited to laugh at Manfred’s appearance even though it’s hard to make Mikkelsen (pictured below with Nikolaj Lie Kaas), one of the planet’s most beautiful and graceful men, into a convincing geek. When distressed he throws himself abruptly out of windows and car doors with all the physical panache of Buster Keaton.
Manfred’s conviction that he is John Lennon and tendency to kidnap the neighbours’ dogs leads to him being sectioned and given a Dissociative Identity Disorder label. Even in the psychiatric hospital, he still won’t tell Anker where the money is buried. Lothar. (Lars Brygmann), a maverick psychiatrist argues that going along with Manfred’s delusion and reuniting him with the other Beatles will bring him back to reality. Lothar persuades Anker to put a band together from similarly deluded patients, all sprung from hospitals in Sweden as well as Denmark. Handily, one patient alternates between being McCartney and Harrison and is played by the genuinely musically talented Kardo Razzazi.
The cash is buried somewhere near the brothers’ childhood home deep in the woods. Conveniently, the house is now owned by a couple who run it as a B&B and host the motley crew. Sophie Grabol plays Margarethe, bitter about her lost career and convinced of her own beauty, she spends her time bickering with her husband, a disfigured fashion designer. He comes in handy when it comes to running up Sgt Pepper costumes. While the deluded Beatles rehearse for a local talent show, Anker struggles with his impatience with his brother and his own demons. He’s prone to extremely violent outbursts that have attracted the attention of the police. Worse still his former partner-in-crime Flemming (Nicolas Bro) is on his trail, wanting his share of the loot and happy to torture Freja to find Anker.
Andersen has probably packed in too many characters and plot twists for his film to altogether gel; it’s certainly not short of narrative flourishes alongside the screwball one-liners and ultra-violence. The film is book-ended by an animation that tells the children's story of a Viking who loses his arm, and functions as an allegory. Also thrown into the mix are lengthy flashbacks to the brothers' traumatic childhood with a sadistic father that goes some way to explain their difficulties in adulthood.
A huge hit in Denmark, The Last Viking may do well with British audiences who enjoy the films of Lars von Trier, Aki Kaurismaki and Nicolas Winding Refn. But Andersen's tendency to mock psychiatric patients and the intellectually disabled, along with the whiff of misogyny in his portrayal and treatment of the two female characters may make this not an easy thrill ride for all.
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