“The Last Viking” is a Dark Comedy About Finding Yourself
The Last Viking is the sixth collaboration between writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen and actors Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Mads Mikkelsen. The film premiered out of competition at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival before having its theatrical run in Denmark in October of the same year. Now, the film comes to American audiences with its distinctly Danish sensibilities. It’s about The Beatles, dissociative identity disorder, and a whole lot of money.
When the audience meets Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), the police are on his tail. He barrels into the apartment where his brother, Manfred (Mads Mikkelsen), and sister, Freja (Bodil Jørgensen), live and entrusts a bag of money to Manfred. Anker tells him to hide it in the forest they used to play in by their mother’s house and to tell no one of its whereabouts. Fifteen years later, prison sentence freshly served, Anker returns home to find Manfred is no longer going by that name. Instead, he believes himself to be John Lennon of The Beatles, a symptom of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). When anyone refers to him as something other than John, he attempts to hurt himself in a myriad of ways. In becoming John, he’s forgotten where the money was buried all those years ago. Drunk and frustrated one night, Anker meets a psychiatrist, Lothar (Lars Brygmann), who believes that Manfred/John’s DID can be helped if they find other DID patients who believe themselves to be the other members of The Beatles.
Photographer: Sebastian Blenkov
In film, DID is usually used in horror movies as a means of a twist in a narrative sense rather than a realistic condition. From The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to Psycho and Split, and plenty more whose names would be spoilers should they be included here, DID is presented as something that makes people a villain. With this diagnosis, regular people become violent, angry individuals who abduct teen girls (Split), commit murder (Psycho), and beat people to death (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). The Last Viking has violence, a surprising amount, but it’s not at the hands of Manfred/John. His only acts of aggression are against himself when his identity isn’t respected. When Anker calls him Manfred instead of John while they’re in a car, Manfred/John throws himself out of the car door. This portrayal of DID feels more rooted in reality than the examples in horror movies that seek to shock instead of extend compassion.
Many cases of DID are rooted in a traumatic event. It can be a one-off moment of trauma, like a natural disaster or accident, or it can be something that’s repeated often, more along the lines of abuse. The Last Viking breadcrumbs the origin of DID for Manfred/John. It’s only at the end that the audience and Anker see the whole picture. Both brothers experienced something in their youth that fundamentally changed them, but how it manifested differs based on the brother. Anker believes he’s fine and well-adjusted, but he’s quick to fly off the handle and there are large swaths of his adolescence that he cannot remember. While Manfred’s DID might be a more visible ripple of the trauma they endured, it doesn’t mean that Anker is unscathed.
The Last Viking is darkly comedic. The type of film with humor that skews toward screwball before socking you in the stomach with a dose of reality. The characters in The Last Viking are all desperately trying to hold themselves together, but the seams are straining. We weren’t meant to do it alone, no matter how much easier we think that will be. The Last Viking is about seeing people as they are, not who we want them to be or who they think they could be, but as they are, with all the imperfections, pride, and possibilities they hold.
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