This comedy-thriller manages to be both very funny and gruesomely violent, with an appetite for the strange and startling that had the Venice Film Festival audience barking with shock as often as laughing. For the most part, the bold mood swings work, largely thanks to a setting which includes several people whose mental health, to put it gently, is not the best. But despite the magnificent actors being equal to the material, the overall unpleasant tone makes The Last Viking hard to recommend.
The core group are three siblings: Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), first seen committing brutal armed robbery, Freja (Bodil Jørgensen), whose nerves are shot, and Manfred (the great Mads Mikkelsen), who is neurodivergent in some unspecified way. Immediately after the robbery, Anker entrusts Manfred with his share of the stolen cash, with instructions to hide the millions on the grounds of the remote farmhouse where they grew up, and to keep that location secret until things die down. Only Anker is immediately arrested and spends the next fifteen years in prison. On release, he is immediately attacked by his nasty former associate Flemming (Nicolas Bro), who has promised Anker’s money to people even nastier than he is. Flemming gives Anker three days to return with the cash, but that is fine, because Manfred knows where it is. Only Anker didn’t know that if anyone calls Manfred ‘Manfred’ these days he throws himself out of the nearest window. Nowadays Manfred is actually John Lennon. And John Lennon has no idea what money Anker is talking about.
Luckily there’s an easy solution: for Lothar from the mental hospital (Lars Brygmann, more on whom later) to reunite the Beatles in the hopes this will unlock Manfred’s memory. There’s a Ringo (Peter Düring) elsewhere in Denmark, and over the border in Sweden there’s a man who is both Paul and George (Kardo Razzazi, who’s excellent). The farmhouse is now a guesthouse run by unhappily married couple Werner (Søren Malling), whose attempts at writing a kid’s book provide the movie with its title, and Margrethe (Sofie Gråbøl, doing beautiful work in an ugly part), who is debating winding down her modelling career. When the madcap caravan of the new Beatles shows up Werner and Margrethe are evolved enough to take it all in stride. It’s Anker who is bewildered into virtual silence since it’s hard to tell who has the worst grasp on reality among the bunch. But there’s a ticking clock, and Flemming is more than happy to torture Freja if she’s the only person he can get his hands on.
Writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen, who has worked repeatedly with both Mr. Mikkelsen and Mr. Kaas, never makes mental illness the butt of the joke. Instead the humor comes from the ridiculous situations mental illness and/or wandering the woods trying to find buried cash without anyone noticing puts you in. (The droll little scene where a hungover Anker wakes up in a hotel room with a hockey stick in bed with him makes a pretty good case that getting blackout drunk has the same effect, too.) The constant physical comedy, especially from Mr. Mikkelsen, goes a long way to leaven the bleakness of the subject matter. Extended flashbacks of a brutal childhood explain why Anker and Manfred are so closely bonded, and make sure that the brothers are on equal footing even when they don’t realise it. Mr. Kaas (who has a small part in the extraordinary Frankenstein, which also premiered at the festival) does really interesting work as a man frustrated that his life has been defined by his capacity for violence. Mr. Brygmann impresses in a very talky and intellectual part as the only person who can get through to everybody here, with a sense of humor so dry it risks starting a fire. And what can be said about Mr. Mikkelsen that hasn’t already? Whenever he works in his own language he is thrilled to get weird, and balances that weirdness by weaponising his physicality to express complicated feelings that transcend language. Joel Hesse Johansen, as young Manfred in a nearly non-verbal part, makes a very strong impression too.
And yet The Last Viking’s imperfections are so strong they spoil the fun. The unpleasant attitude to Margrethe’s appearance and the ultraviolence against both Margrethe and Freja include more than a whiff of misogyny. The animated sequences which bookend the story are so disturbing by design that they add more sourness than strictly necessary. Some of the plot twists are pretty obvious, too. But it’s clear Mr. Jensen is not interested in playing safe, whether in tone, setting or message. That absolute refusal to sanitise any of the bleaker topics here makes The Last Viking a brave movie indeed. It’s just a little too raw, in every sense of the word.
The Last Viking (Den Sidste Viking) recently played at the Venice Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Venice site for the title.
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