Mads Mikkelsen as John Lennon: “The Last Viking” Turns Identity into a Black Comedy

Paris – 14 July 2026: At first, there is no sign of a Viking in Anders Thomas Jensen’s new film. Instead, there is a released bank robber, missing loot and a brother who insists that he is John Lennon. “The Last Viking”, originally titled “Den sidste viking”, opens in French cinemas on Wednesday, 15 July 2026 – and relies on the peculiarly warm-hearted cruelty that has characterized the Danish director’s cinema for years.

Nikolaj Lie Kaas plays Anker, who has only one thing on his mind after 15 years in prison: finding the money from an earlier robbery. Before his arrest, he had entrusted the key to a locker to his younger brother Manfred. But Manfred, played by Mads Mikkelsen, now lives under the name John and believes himself to be the Beatles singer. The search for cash thus becomes a journey through a web of memory, injury and self-assertion.

Jensen, who also wrote the screenplay, does not treat the transformation of his characters as a mere gag. His comedy is interested in the gaze of others: Who gets to decide what counts as normal, and when does a role become a refuge? Manfred’s Lennon fantasy is both absurd and touching. It gives Mikkelsen a performance whose comic power stems precisely from the seriousness of his acting. No ironic distance rescues the character; that is what makes him as moving as he is unpredictable.

Anker’s increasingly desperate attempts to bring his brother to reason and to the hiding place of the loot lead into a milieu of quirky supporting players, old family scars and looming violence. Sofie Graabol, Lars Brygmann, Bodil Joergensen, Soeren Malling and Nicolas Bro are among the rest of the cast. The film brings together several tones: crime story, road movie, family melodrama and black humor sit at the same table here – not always peacefully, but with remarkable focus.

Mikkelsen and Kaas have long known Jensen’s skewed universe. “The Last Viking” is already the director’s sixth collaboration with the two actors. In films such as “Adams Aepfel”, “Diener des Volkes” and “Helden der Wahrscheinlichkeit”, they have explored the blend of grotesque comedy, melancholy and sudden tenderness that makes Jensen so distinctive. This time, too, laughter is never entirely without shadows.

The 116-minute film had its world premiere out of competition at the Venice Film Festival at the end of August 2025. The French theatrical version is rated for viewers aged 12 and over. The title promises a Nordic adventure, but Jensen’s real expedition leads inward: to the place where identities are not fixed, brothers lose one another and perhaps find one another again precisely through misunderstanding.

The fact that a man in a windproof jacket and a Beatles haircut can become the emotional center of a criminal misadventure is a punchline of great subtlety. Mads Mikkelsen does not turn Manfred into an oddball to be laughed at, but into a person whose invented story contains more truth than the reality others want to impose on him.