The Last Viking

First there were the hit TV thrillers: Borgen, Wallander and The Killing. Then came the movies: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, In Order Of Disappearance and the sublimely twisted Headhunters. Then the Scandi noir wave kinda petered out, with a Hollywood brain drain drawing a line under these blackly funny, bleakly violent and deviously plotted studies of humans deep in the shit. 

Thankfully, Danish writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen and his on-screen muse Mads Mikkelsen seem hellbent on reanimating the genre – even co-opting two stalwarts in The Killing’s Sofie Gråbøl and Søren Malling for their latest and most leftfield team-up.

Following up their gonzo family comedy Men & Chicken and gangland noir Riders of Justice – a Bikeriders-with-toothache splurge of gallows humour and extreme violence – the pair return with a goofier (but, in fairness, still fairly violent) delve into the darker recesses of Danish psyche. This time, the filmmaker hangs an endearingly offbeat exploration of men’s mental health on the framework of a crime thriller. 

Riders of Justice’s Nikolaj Lie Kaas is Anker, a brooding bank robber with major anger issues. Fresh from prison, he’s got the weekend to find out where his mentally unwell brother Manfred (Mikkelsen) buried the loot before local gangster Flemming (Nicolas Bro) starts chopping off body parts. But Manfred now thinks he’s John Lennon and will throw himself out of a moving car if his brother doesn’t treat him as such.

Warmth, empathy and severed fingers in the same film? Scandi noir is back

It’s certainly a predicament for the desperate Anker, and it only gets more infuriating when he and Manfred/John head to their childhood home with psychiatrist Lothar (Lars Brygmann) in tow. Lothar’s solution to Manfred’s dissociative identity disorder, and to unlocking his memories, is to rope in a patient who thinks he’s Paul and George and another who believes he’s Ringo, get them all instruments and go full Sgt Pepper’s. The property’s owners (Gråbøl and Malling) help out with costumes and an impromptu rehearsal space. Meanwhile, Anker is out in the woods digging for all he’s worth.

There’s flashbacks to the brothers’ childhoods and the abusive dad who treated Manfred’s Viking obsession with violent beatings. A more straight-faced back story, it adds a note of melancholy to the bonkers Beatles tribute in the present day.

What stops this screwball scenario feeling exploitative in a Rain Man-ish way is that the punching is all upwards. Anker is the butt of the joke – the humourless ex-con who only cares about his missing stash – and Flemming, a gormless thug with a DIY obsession, too. In The Last Viking’s world, the sane and the psychologically impaired are one and the same. The diagnosis is that we’re all human and thus probably all a bit mad. Warmth, empathy and severed fingers in the same film? Scandi noir is back. 

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Jun 26.