Film festivals are populated by legendary figures whose exploits travel from one accredited badge-holder to the next. In Venice, for instance, everyone remembers the Roy Andersson fan, even if no one seems to know who he actually is. At every screening of the Swedish director—famed for a singular visual language and an even more singular brand of comedy—the audience often sits in a kind of puzzled silence, unsure whether to laugh politely or simply surrender to disorientation. It happened in 2019 during the screening of the Golden Lion winner A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, and again five years later with About Endlessness: somewhere in the room, in near-total silence, a loud, knowing, almost brazenly self-assured laugh would erupt, as if to signal to everyone present: “I get Roy Andersson’s humour, unlike you poor bastards.”
I thought of this mythical figure from Venice festival folklore while watching My Brother Is a Viking, because in more than one scene there is a strain of dark comedy that feels elusive, almost ungraspable. The singularity of Anders Thomas Jensen’s cinema becomes especially evident when experienced in an international festival screening room. In a Jensen film, everyone laughs—more or less—but always at different moments, out of sync, slightly dissonant. It is the exact opposite of mainstream American comedy: that broadly universal, mildly ingratiating humour which, while rooted in a very specific cultural code, works hard to render itself immediately legible—jokes about bipartisan politics, jury duty, baseball—so that you feel included even when none of it belongs to your everyday life.
Jensen operates on an entirely different register, one that feels as Danish—and, I suspect, as untranslatable—as cinema can get. From the opening sequence, a kind of animated fairy tale about two deeply bonded Viking brothers whose affection culminates in an unexpectedly brutal, almost pedagogical happy ending, the film establishes its own black moral universe. This is because Jensen finds something oddly generative in the violence of Viking folklore. As he has said: “The Vikings are interesting because, beyond the violence they are remembered for, they had a very direct value system: telling the truth and taking responsibility for one’s actions. They didn’t spend their time wondering who they were. And that creates a sharp contrast with the present, where identity is more fluid and uncertain, and introspection is sometimes taken to excess.”
From there, My Brother Is a Viking unfolds as a sequence of destabilising narrative turns, where laughter cuts through the darkest moments while something faintly sinister flickers inside the funniest ones. And yet, paradoxically, it is one of the most successful Danish cultural exports of recent years—second only, in a sense, to its muse: Mads Mikkelsen, the face of Nordic cinema, here in his sixth collaboration with Jensen.
He is not the only Danish director to treat Mikkelsen almost as a fetish object (Nicolas Winding Refn and Susanne Bier also come to mind), but Jensen is certainly the one who pushes him furthest into risk. In My Brother Is a Viking, Mikkelsen plays a man somewhere on the autistic spectrum (deliberately left undefined). While his brother is in prison for pulling off a million-dollar heist and hiding the loot before his arrest, his younger brother Manfred has become convinced he is John Lennon. Once released, the thief needs his brother to lead him to the hidden money—but only by entering his delusion, in a surreal escalation that eventually brings together a psychiatrist and a group of patients who believe they are members of the Beatles.
This spiralling narrative becomes, in many ways, a way of thinking about identity: the roles we construct for ourselves, and those society expects us to perform, particularly in relation to masculinity, criminality, and brotherhood. The “sane” brother, while genuinely attached to Manfred-as-John-Lennon, struggles to rebuild their relationship, caught between affection and frustration. Yet Manfred also becomes a mirror in which his brother’s own self-mythology is reflected: the tough guy, the criminal, the rational man. To retrieve the loot, Anker must gradually surrender to his brother’s worldview, allowing himself to be drawn into its logic—and its madness.
ⓢ During screenings there is often a sense that the audience laughs at different moments, almost out of sync. How much does cultural context shape the comedy in My Brother Is a Viking?
Anders Thomas Jensen:
That’s an interesting question. I’ve seen how my films are received in different contexts, and the reaction varies greatly from country to country. In the United States, for instance, it’s completely different from Europe, and even between Canada and the US there are noticeable differences. I don’t really try to adapt the humour to a specific audience: I start from something that works for me, but each culture inevitably responds in its own way.
Mads Mikkelsen:
This isn’t a “dramatic” film in the traditional sense, but abroad it is often perceived as one. Anders writes very dense, precise dialogue, and subtitles probably convey only about thirty percent of it. Language is essential to his cinema, so something is inevitably lost in translation. If the film still lands, it means it’s operating on another level—we just don’t fully know which one.
ⓢ What reaction do you fear the most?
Mads Mikkelsen:
Perhaps the most difficult audience for us is the one closest to us culturally, like the Swedish audience. We are similar, but things are sometimes interpreted in very different ways. Still, the hope is always that the film finds its own path.
ⓢ You’ve now made six films together. What makes this collaboration so solid, and how has it changed over time?
Anders Thomas Jensen:
For me, Mads is one of the greatest actors working today. He has an extraordinary physical presence and a rare ability to make even the most extreme or grotesque material feel credible. Over the years, our relationship has become more intuitive: now we only need a few words to understand each other.
Mads Mikkelsen:
Anders has a very distinctive voice—he makes films unlike anyone else’s. Coming back to work with him, and with the same group of actors, feels like coming home. Over time we’ve become braver: we trust each other more, so we can push further. With Anders I’ve often reached the limits of what I thought was possible—sometimes even gone beyond them. But that’s precisely the point: you can go that far because you’re in a safe environment, surrounded by people who know where the boundaries are.
ⓢ Your work also translates well to Hollywood, yet you keep returning to Danish cinema and to Anders. Why?
Mads Mikkelsen:
It’s great to work abroad, but it’s equally important to come home—and I’ve fortunately been able to do that. In Denmark everything is different, starting with storytelling and language. But Anders’ films are something else entirely, even within Danish cinema—there’s nothing quite like them anywhere.
ⓢ The film revolves around identity. Where does that interest come from, and how did you approach it?
Anders Thomas Jensen:
It comes from the present. I noticed that we used to photograph places and other people; now we constantly turn the camera on ourselves, documenting our own presence in space and time. It’s a profound cultural shift—neither inherently good nor bad, but one with important consequences. We also live in a time where it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and construction, between what is authentic and what is not. It’s a theme that runs through everyday life, from social media to ordinary conversation.
Mads Mikkelsen:
And the film explores this through a character who embodies an extreme version of that condition: he believes he is John Lennon, or at least a version of him. Given this focus, we deliberately chose not to define him through a diagnosis. That wasn’t the point. I worked instead on a childlike dimension: he is like a child, sometimes five, sometimes seven years old, with all the spontaneity and openness that implies.