The Last Viking
Comedy • 2025 • 1h 56m
Den Sidste Viking
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
After years in prison, Anker discovers that the loot from a robbery was hidden by his brother… too bad Manfred has forgotten where. Between improbable chases, hilarious dialogues, and increasingly absurd situations, the two embark on a journey in search of the money and, surprisingly, of themselves.
“The ridiculous is a visual insult. The grotesque is a conceptual insult.”
— Fabrizio Caramagna
The Last Viking by Anders Thomas Jensen is not just a film: it is a delirious journey through the labyrinths of human absurdity, an experience that blends biting comedy, grotesque exaggeration, and madness, and which, within its apparent chaos, delivers a surprisingly powerful moral lesson. Jensen plays with memory, madness, and family ties, turning the search for hidden loot into an existential metaphor on belonging, diversity, and equality.
The story follows two brothers, Anker and Manfred, trapped in a spiral of lost memories, amid deception, misunderstandings, and situations so absurd they provoke roaring laughter. But behind the unabashed comedy, Jensen conceals a deeper reflection: the diversity of the characters, each with their own eccentricities and vulnerabilities, becomes a tool to explore the intrinsic equality that binds them, the necessity of accepting oneself, and of understanding others.
Every scene is a small paradox: razor-sharp dialogues, exaggerated scenarios, controlled madness. It is cinema that swings between laughter and contemplation, between the absurd and the moral—a grotesque mirror of the human condition. The protagonists’ madness becomes an allegory of our own search for identity and meaning in a world that is often incomprehensible.
Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas bring to life characters who are both hilarious and profound, embodying humanity in its most extreme contradictions. The performances, combined with Jensen’s direction, create an experience as entertaining as it is enlightening: a surreal and intense reflection on the value of diversity, on mutual understanding, and on the paradoxical equality of those who, though different, strive to coexist in harmony with others.
A wild, irresistible dark comedy, an exhilarating jolt that manages to reconcile absurdity with the most solid and convincing morality.
“The absurd is lucid reason acknowledging its limits.”
— Albert Camus
