Making its Australian debut as part of the 2026 Hurtigruten Nordic Film Festival, Danish film The Last Viking is a cleverly written, multilayered dark comedy. It grabs you from the very start in a wild, relentless ride, never letting you go until it is done making you feel ALL the feelings.
It has, quite literally, a bit of everything: a heist gone wrong, escaped patients from (multiple) mental hospitals who think they are John, Paul, George and Ringo (yes, from the Beatles), missing “buried treasure”, a cabin by the woods, and much childhood trauma.
Heavy on the trauma – both emotional and otherwise. In fact, the movie has an unsettling amount of blood and guts. However, it is tempered with unhinged, laugh-out-loud comedy.
The film starts (and ends) with an animated sequence, telling a tale of a Viking clan where there are two brothers – both handsome, healthy, and wise. Tragedy befalls one of the brothers, resulting in the loss of an arm, and of course, his self-esteem. To counteract this, his father, the chief, orders every single male in the clan to remove an arm. After all, “When everyone is missing a foot, no one is missing a foot.” Or an arm, as the case may be.
At first glance, this seems completely disconnected from the rest of the movie. But bear with me – without giving too much away, the context will reveal itself by the end.
Anker Andersen (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) has stolen 41.7 million Kroner, but can hear the helicopters and sirens approaching. He tasks his brother Manfred (played to perfection by Mads Mikkelsen) with hiding the cash in the woods near their family home – a risk seeing as Manfred has a “diagnosis” (which we later discover is Dissociative Identity Disorder, DID), but Anker has little choice. Cut to 15 years later, and Anker is finally out of prison. He tries to ask Manfred where he hid the money, but Manfred insists on being called John. John W. Lennon. And every time Anker forgets and calls him by his name, John tries to hurt himself badly. When an unfortunate incident finds John flinging himself out of a moving car, he lands in a psych ward, where we meet psychiatrist Lothar (Lars Bryggman), who suggests they let this John Lennon thing play out, and seeks the other three “band members”, who all have the same diagnosis. Except Paul/George (Kardo Razzazi) also sometimes identifies as Bjorn from ABBA, and Ringo is mute. This makes for comedy gold – especially since Bjorn keeps insisting on rearing his head and singing ABBA songs, stressing Anker out because he needs Manfred to come back and tell him where he hid the money.
But behind the hilarity, there are serious issues under the surface. We discover the dark and violent backstory behind the DID – a childhood marked by abuse at the hands of their father, who belted Anker every time he thought Anker was not keeping Manfred in check enough, while Manfred was forced to watch. Anker was held accountable every time young Viking-obsessed Manfred brought out his toy Viking hat – which he thought embarrassed the family. We see the brotherly bond – Anker would wear his own Viking hat in solidarity with Manfred when he was teased by schoolmates, and Manfred took care of Anker when he could, even revealing some painful truths that Anker had repressed.
In the end, I felt that Manfred was not only the hero of the film, but the “sanest” character of them all. The moral of the story, perhaps, is what the Viking fable told us all along: shared pain may not erase the wound, but certainly makes it easier to bear.
The Last Viking is showing as part of the Hurtigruten Nordic Film Festival until 26th August.