Parky At the Pictures (26/6/2026)

(Reviews of A Private Life; Blue Heron; Virginia Woolf's Night & Day; and The Last Viking)

A PRIVATE LIFE.

In her 15-year directing career to date, Rebecca Zlotowski has explored the pressures placed on young women in Belle Épine (2010) and An Easy Girl (2019) and mothers in Other People's Children (2022). She has also twinned passion and radiation in Grand Central (2013) and séances and cinema in Planetarium (2016). Now, she touches on psychiatry and secrets in A Private Life, which sees Jodie Foster performing in French for the first time since Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement (2004).

Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster) is a Jewish American psychiatrist working from home in Paris. Divorced from Gabriel Haddad (Daniel Auteuil) and estranged from their son, Julien Haddad-Park (Vincent Lacoste), Lilian has started to go through the motions with her patients. However, she is surprised when Pierre Hallan (Noam Morgensztern) calls after hours to claim that he has wasted eight years visiting her when hypnotist Jessica Grangé (Sophie Guillemin) cured him of his smoking habit in 20 minutes. Lilian is further discomfited to learn that her patient of nine years, Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira), has died suddenly and she is ordered to leave the shiva by her furious husband, Simon (Mathieu Amalric), after she had been invited by their daughter, Valérie (Luana Bajrami).

Finding herself tearing up all the time, Lilian consults Gabriel, who is an opthamologist. He reassures her that everything is fine and teases her about spending so little time with Julien and his infant son, Joseph. She only calls on Julien when she needs new discs for her dictaphone and he suggests she would be better off using a digital system to avoid losing things. Further upset by Valérie calling to reveal that Paula had committed suicide using pills that she had prescribed, Lilian decides to visit Jessica, in the hope that she can hypnotise her tears away.

Struggling to overcome her professional scepticism, Lilian is taken by Jessica's calm manner and allows herself to be taken back in time to Nazi-era Paris, where she is revealed to be a male cellist having an affair with Paula, a fellow musician in conductor Simon's orchetra. As she comes out of her trance, Jessica explains that Lilian is mourning Paula because they have an emotional connection in the past. But she angrily rejects the idea and accuses the hypnotist of playing an anti-Semitic joke.

Leaving Paula's funeral when Simon spots her watching from a distance in the cemetery, Lilian returns home and listens to some of Paula's taped sessions. She comes across the revelation that Simon is not Valérie's daughter and Paula fears that she will kill her if she finds out. When she had come to Lilian's office, Valérie had given her a note scribbled in German on the pill prescription and Lilian meets with Gabriel to share her suspicion that Paula was murdered by her own child. The fact she has been getting threatening phone calls convinces her that she's stumbled on to the truth, but Gabriel is more cautious, as Lilian has been knocking back the red wine during dinner.

They tumble into bed together before Lilian finds red liquid has been poured over her car. She also wakes in the night to find her office has been ransacked and Paula's last cassette has been stolen. When she reports the matter to the police, however, the young cop looks at her as though she was crazy.

Returning home, Lilian listens to one of Paula's tapes and hears that Simon is often away for a couple of days a week in Chérence. She is interrupted by Valérie at her door, but Lilian insists on seeing her in the nearby café so that Gabriel can look out for her at the bar. However, the discussion leads Lilian to change her mind, as Valérie tells her that Paula had just inherited a fortune from her aunt, Pearl Friedman (Aurore Clément), and that she and Simon had now split it following her mother's death. This convinces Lilian that Simon is the killer and Gabriel spotting that the prescription had been tampered with sends them to the pharmacy to find out what had happened. Here, she learns that Simon read the prescription because the writing was smudged and this is how he got hold of solution not pills.

Having learned Pearl's name, Lilian realises that she must have been the woman in the audience in her dream and she asks Jessica for a second consultation, but she refuses because Lilian had been rude to her. She goes instead to see her mentor, Professor Samy Goldstein (Frederick Wiseman), for some advice. But he ticks her off for breaking procedure by prescribing medication even though she is fully licences (not allowed in France) and he suggests she is still hung up on her own mother's death. Reminding Samy she's no longer his patient, Lilian departs in a huff.

Back home, Lilian tries to remember the Occupation dream. She recalls Paula telling her that she is pregnant and sees Simon wielding a gun and shooting Paula as he conducts. She also recognises Julien as the leader of the militiamen searching for Jews and remembers fleeing the concert hall with a postcard from Chérence in her hand. She decides to drive there through the night and follows Simon to his house, where she rifles through his bin and finds a hair iron similar to the one ordered after Paula's death that Gabriel had stolen from Simon's doorstep while Lilian was in the pharmacy.

Following a bizarre dinner with Julien and his wife, in which Lilian tells him he was a Nazi in her dream and that explains why they haven't been particularly close until now, Lilian and Gabriel return to Chérence so the latter can pose as a stranded motorist to distract Simon while Lilian searches for the missing disc. His lover's young son finds her rootling and she convinces him that she's part of his dream and sends him back to bed.

Gabriel is certain that Simon is dangerous, but he also suggests that they are better off staying friends rather than resuming their old romance because it clearly spooks Julien. As they lament that they let their love fade (as rain cascades down the car windshield), they are interrupted by a phone call informing Lilian that Pierre has been arrested for stalking her. He apologises for the break-in and Lilian lights his cigarette with a disapproving shrug, as they leave the police station after she has the charges quashed.

Entering her building, Lilian hears Paula on her couch. The conversation booms down the staircase, as she climbs to find Simon awaiting her. He wants her to accept responsibility for Paula's actions, as he explains that she doctored the prescription to get extra medication to kill Pearl to inherit her money. Guilt caught up with her, however, and she committed suicide and left the bequest to him and Valérie. Lilian is afraid, but also feels foolish because Simon accuses her of failing to listen to her patients, which makes her morally liable for their misdeeds.

She takes his words to heart and calls on Julien and gives Joseph his bottle, as she tries to explain that she kept him at a distance so that he would never be dependent upon her. A few weeks later, Pierre turns up for his regular appointment and he notices that Lilian no longer records her sessions, as she has learned the value of listening.

Echoes of Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) pervade this enjoyable, if slight whodunit. Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil may not spark quite like Allen and Diane Keaton, but they have some nice scenes together, particularly when they reflect on why their marriage ended. Foster has an equally intense scene with Vincente Lacoste, as she tries to justify her maternal shortcomings. But the twists and turns of a determinedly convoluted plot leave little room for character development, despite Lilian displaying a cavalier attitude towards the ethical code of her profession and the law of the land.

Writing with Anne Berest and Gaëlle Macé, Zlotowski stuffs the scenario with red herrings rather than clues that could enable the armchair detective to solve the puzzle. But they fail to make the Cohen-Solals interesting, let alone suspicious, with Virginie Efira being given far too little to do in montages designed to evoke fleeting memories and onrushing ideas, while also retaining a degree of ambiguity. Mathieu Amalric is suitably resistible as the shiftless spouse, but Zlotowski struggles to build any suspense, as the focus keeps meandering away to Lilian's private life and her MacGuffin-like relationship with Pierre.

An intriguing angle arises from Lilian's attitude towards her patient and the notion that she knows little about them outside what they tell her and that some, if not all, of the information they provide might be entirely, or in some part, untrue. She certainly doesn't seem to have much understanding of Paula or Pierre, while another montage shows her being equally detached from her other clients, who include Sophie Letourneur in a cameo as brief as Irène Jacob, as Gabriel's old flame.

George Lechaptois's photography is fascinating, especially when it seeks to blur or distort the imagery to suggest Lilian's mental state. Robin Coudert's score is also notable, as it switches between being playful and predatory. But the double use of the Talking Heads classic, `Psycho Killer', and the closing burst of JJ Cale's `Don't Go to Strangers' steal the musical show. With all its slick SFX, the wartime reverie recalls the Salvador Dalí dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). But it also brings to mind Kenneth Branagh's less accomplished Dead Again (1991) and feels just as shoehorned in, even though it affords Zlotowski an opportunity to reference anti-Semitism, which is as rife in France as it is elsewhere across 2020s Europe, which should alarm us all much more than it currently does, given history's habit of repeating itself and humankind's recurring inability to learn its lessons.

BLUE HERON.

Canadian film-maker Sophy Romvari is the granddaughter of the Hungarian production designer, József Romvári, who notably worked on István Szabó's Colonel Redl (1986) and Hanussen (1988). Indeed, the auteur narrated Romvari's short, Remembrance of József Romvári (2020), which was the second film she had devoted to her grandfather after her debut short, Nine Behind (2016). Romvari has now made two films about her brother, as she follows the acclaimed documentary short, Still Processing (2020), with Blue Heron, a first feature that is as stylistically ambitious as it is psychologically poignant.

Eight year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven) has just moved to Vancouver Island with her emigrant Hungarian parents (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa), her older brothers, Henry (Liam Serg) and Felix (Preston Drabble), and their 15 year-old half-sibling, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), from their mother's first marriage. As father has to work on the computer, mother takes the kids for a look around their new locale and Jeremy steals a blue heron keyring from the gift shop at a wildlife centre. Only Sasha notices, but she says nothing.

She also seems unconcerned when she goes out to play with some neighbourhood girls of her own age and gets soaked when she decides to see what it feels like to stand on a swimming pool cover and she has to walk home humming and wringing out her top. When asked by her mother, she says they have been playing in a sprinkler. But mother is more concerned about Jeremy, who is playing dead on the front step and one of the neighbours calls to let them know.

Mother is frustrated that she is having to keep the kids amused during the summer while her husband works. But she is also becoming increasingly exasperated by Jeremy's erratic behaviour and his unwillingness to be part of the family. Father has formally adopted him, but there is still tension with mother because she insists on Jeremy being treated the same as everyone else, even when he's acting out. He stays away from everyone when they go for a day on the beach, but he drops the key ring on the pebble sculpture Sasha is making before wandering off on his own while the others are swimming. It starts to thunder, but there is no sign of Jeremy and mother snaps at him when she eventually finds him at a petrol station. Sasha watches everything quietly, without really understanding why her brother acts the way he does.

While mother is visiting the child psychologist, father takes photos of Henry and Felix floating origami boats in a tin bath before amusing them in his darkroom as he develops the prints. Mother is cross with him for getting to be the hero while she was in a difficult meeting. She plays the tape when they're in bed and the psychologist suggests that Jeremy has Oppositional Defined Disorder and advices them not to let him be boss of the household. Sasha interrupts them because she can't sleep and mother sends father to her room so they can have a girlie night. However, he carries her off to be once she's fallen asleep.

Father films Sasha and her friends making water balloons in the garden. Her brothers are bouncing on a trampoline when a cop arrives with Jeremy in handcuffs. He has been caught shoplifting and father tries to talk with him and has to bear hug him to stop him lashing out. Sasha watches through the bedroom window. She also peers out when Jeremy climbs on to the roof while she is helping mother make potato fritters. They burn in the pan, as the parents try to reason with the teenager, who lets the hint of a smile appear at the corner of his mouth because he has succeeded in getting a rise out of them. A few nights later, he puts his hand through a window and passively lets his mother bind the wound on his wrist. Social services visit soon afterwards and we hear mother telling someone on the phone that she has agreed to Jeremy being taken into care because she feels she has failed him and hopes someone else can turn him into a superstar. Sasha watches from the trampoline, as her mother looks through the window at her son listening to music on his headphones.

At this point, the action jumps forward several years, with Sasha (Amy Zimmer) now being a young film-maker who has assembled some social workers to show them Jeremy's case notes in order to ascertain whether he would have been treated any differently today. She also Skypes with the social worker, who recalls having a lot of respect for the way her parents tried to handle things. Sasha is struggling to equate her memories of Jeremy with the chaos he caused and she gets upset after the call, in which the social worker remarked that her brother used to keep gasoline in his room because he had threatened to burn the house down.

Somehow, Sasha goes back in time on the ferry to see her family in the guise of the social worker. She smiles at her younger self watching an Elmer Fudd cartoon and looks at some of the maps that Jeremy had painstakingly drawn in his room. As the social worker, she meets her parents and they explain how sad they feel at having to place Jeremy in foster care. But they also admit to having tried everything and now need to focus on protecting the other children - and we see Henry and Felix playing quietly together and young Sasha looking in on her parents being interviewed by her adult self.

Grown Sasha joins Jeremy on the rocks above the beach and he tells her that there were lots of things she didn't see in addition to the events she had remembered. She reads him a condolence letter she had received from one of his classmates, who remembers him as a gentle soul who kept getting invovled with the wrong people. He is sorry for her loss and she gazes out to see trying to make sense of who her brother was and what she knew and saw of him.

Deeply personal, but also highly cinematic, Blue Heron boldly blurs fact and fiction, most notably in the final third when the action adopts a meta vibe that makes it more revealing and moving, as Romvari follows in the footsteps of Chantal Akerman by trying to make art while making sense of her memories. Her focus isn't solely on her brother, however, as she reflects upon the way in which parent-child relations shift over time and how tensions with the older kids impact upon younger ones who still trust their mother and father implicitly and can't ever imagine not doing so. Young Sasha wants to understand Jeremy and be close to him, if only because she needs an ally because Henry and Felix are so close. But she always finds herself siding with her parents because they offer her security, attention, amusement, and answers - as well as love.

Newcomer Eylul Guven is endearingly sombre as the watchful Sasha, who cautiously makes friends with the local girls because everyone at home is preoccupied. Iringó Réti's mother dotes on her almost as if she's a reward for having endured so much with her eldest, while Ádám Tompa's father forever has her in the lens of his camera or camcorder, as he does with his sons. But he clearly has an uneasy relationship with Jeremy that is rooted in events off screen relating to his mother's first marriage and the reasons why the family came to Canada in the first place. This withholding of backstory makes it difficult to know precisely what the taciturnly self-destructive Jeremy is kicking against, especially as the admirably understated Edik Beddoes makes him so impenitrably enigmatic behind his granny glasses. He takes all of his secrets with him, too, and they are respected in the final section that resists revealing either how he lived after he went into foster care or how he died. The fate of the rest of the family is also left shrouded, although it has already been disclosed in Still Processing.

Making adept use of long lenses and unexpected angles, cinematographer Maya Bankovic cannily sees the landscape from a child's perspective, while editor Kurt Walker creates impressionistic snippets that feel fully lived and half-remembered, as they are cocooned in Péter Benjámin Lukács's immersive sound design, which both locates the family in the real world and drowns it out, leaving them in an isolation that comes as much from them being new arrivals as foreigners - and which they totally accept, hence mother explaining why she can't invite her friends to tea, `It's better like this, to keep it separate.' The young Sasha doesn't understand neighbourhood politics, but the older version (who is clearly intended to be Romvari's stand-in) is now alert to what she might have missed or misremembered. The trouble is, as grief allows us to remember rather than understand, the truth will always remain elusive because it's the small details that tend to stick in our minds rather than the bigger picture.

VIRGINIA WOOLF'S NIGHT & DAY.

Film-makers have hardly beaten down Virginia Woolf's door in the century since she started writing. She has appeared in the form of the Oscar-winning Nicole Kidman in Stephen Daldry's The Hours (2002) and of Elizabeth Debicki in Chanya Button's Vita & Virginia (2018). But, since Hugh Stoddart adapted To the Lighthouse for Colin Gregg's 1983 BBC teleplay, only Sally Potter's Orlando (1992) and Marleen Gorris's Mrs Dalloway (1997) have reached the big screen. The latter has recently been reworked as Clarissa by the Nigerian-born brothers, Arie and Chuko Esiri. But sophomore Tina Gharavi is so keen to identify with the author that she has included her name in the title of Virginia Woolf's Night & Day.

Edwardian bluestocking, Katharine Hilbery (Haley Bennett), is determined to overcome the obstacles preventing her from becoming an astronomer. She is fond of aspiring poet William Rodney (Jack Whitehall), but views him solely as a friend and, consequently, turns down his marriage proposal. Moreover, she has seen how mother Bess (Jennifer Saunders) has been prevented from writing a biography of her poet father by the petty distractions of running a household and being supportive to Katharine's stern father, Terence (Timothy Spall).

Devoted to her cousin, Cyril Otway (Misia Butler), Katharine sees him whenever he is in London. He agrees to smuggle her into the Astronomical Society and she disguises herself as a man in order to hear Sir Alexander Holmes (Alex Macqueen) read the result of a vote to allow female members. She is dismayed when the status quo is maintained, but has to hold her tongue in case she is discovered. Nevertheless, word of her excursion reaches her father, who angrily reminds her that she has to abide by his rules under his roof.

In a bid to cheer Katharine up and get back in her good books, William takes her to a soirée being hosted by the Mary Datchett (Lily Allen), who fascinates her with her free-thinking ideas about women's place in society. While star-gazing on the roof, she also makes the acquaintance of Ralph Denham (Elyas M'Barek), who encourages her to reach for her dream. Inspired, Katharine decides to accept William in order to please her father and escape his orbit so that she can study in peace.

William is delighted by the news, as is Mr Hilbery, who toasts the couple with champagne. However, Katharine uses her new freedom to take a room in the building where Mary operates a printing press to produce materials to advance the cause of women in all areas of British life. Katharine chips in to earn her keep and soon feels confident enough to apply for a place to read physics at Cambridge. All she needs is for Cyril to give her a reference, but their meeting goes badly when Katharine criticises him for his active love life.

Needing a mentor, Katharine seeks out Lady Margaret Huggins (Frances Barber), who is respected for her contributions to the writings of her scientist husband. She tells Katharine that she has the ideas and does much of the work, but has to let her spouse take the credit in order to secure publication. Yet, while she agrees that the system is unfair, she tells Katharine that it's a waste of time trying to make waves, as men simply don't want women involved in science.

Returning home, Katharine is surprised to find Ralph in conversation with her father. He is his assisant and Mr Hilbery has detailed him to help Bess finish her book so that he can have his wife back. Katharine is furious and emits a silent scream match that is match cut with a fiery explosion out in space. However, she becomes more determined than ever to achieve her goal and a montage shows her chalking calculations on a blackboard in an effort to discover a cosmic yardstick that could be used to measure vast distances across the universe. No sooner has she succeeded, however, than she sees an article in her father's newspaper congratulating an American woman on making the same deduction. Rather than scream again, Katharine crams a hard-boiled egg in her mouth and chews hard in exasperation.

Christmas comes and Katharine is coerced into spending the festive season with the Otway cousins. Sir Francis (Simon Phillips) is even more of a martinet than Terence and he makes it clear that he wishes that Cyril had not come home for the holidays. However, Cassandra (Camilla Borghesani) takes a shine to William and he is flattered by her interest in his poetry. Katharine hardly notices, as she is preoccupied with Cyril being cross with her for forging a reference on her Cambridge application. She also becomes wrapped up in watching Halley's comet and even her father is humbled when she reveals that they will all be long gone the next time it passes.

At midnight mass, Katharine is amused to discover that Mary is the sister of the resident vicar (Ivan Andrienko) and she has to stifle her laughter when Mary deliberately sings the carols out of tune. Over Christmas lunch, however, things take a darker turn, when Sir Francis curses Cyril for being gay and he storms out of the house. As he crosses the field, he collapses and Katharine runs out to discover he's dead. Consoled by her father, she volunteers to carry the coffin and break off her engagement at the graveside, which comes as something of a relief to William, as he wants to marry Cassandra.

On returning to London, Katharine pays a visit to Cyril's partner, Laurie (Aaron Cobham), a Black northerner who informs her that he is leaving the city and wants her to have their home. Katharine accepts after her father forbids her to go to Cambridge when he opens the letter inviting her to an interview. Aware that she is the only woman in the waiting area, she rides the fuss that the dons had presumed she was male (as she had applied using Cyril's nickame for her, `Kit') to seize the chance to impress with her research into the cosmic yardstick. The three male scientists scoff at her work and joke that there is no place for women in astronomy. With her eyes stinging with tears, as all that has recently happened flashes before her eyes, Katharine turns back to give the panel a piece of her mind. She warns them that the tide has turned and that women will find a place in Oxbridge and that frightened men won't be able to do a thing to prevent it. Moreover, she reminds them of their insignificance in the grand scheme.

While attending the launch of her mother's book, at which she is disturbed to hear Bess waxing lyrical about Ralph, Katharine is surprised to see her father looking happy. He had stayed away from the party, but had wanted to hand her the letter confirming her place at Cambridge. Begrudgingly, he admits he is proud of her and even forgives her for breaking up with William. As Bess teases the cousin (Sally Phillips) who had derided her for taking so long over the book, she concludes her speech with the profound observation, `Everyone's truth is the house they live in.'

Highly popular with the male students, Katharine settles in at Cambridge. Ralph comes to see her, as he is returning to Persia. He asks if she could envisage a time when she would have enough room in her life for romance and she promises to let him know the moment she does. They kiss.

Virginia Woolf wasn't particularly proud of Night and Day and it feels odd that her name has been appended to the title of this film adaptation when it departs so radically from the actual text. Cambridge-educated screenwriter Justine Waddell simplifies the tangle of relationships in order to focus on Katharine's feminist struggle to emancipate herself from her father and show the stuffed-shirted boffins that she has every right to study at their university. Such shifts are understandable, as they make the story more accessible and perinent to modern audiences. However, this approach is higly misleading, as not only had women been attending the single-sex Girton College for around half a century, but they would not be able to take full degrees for another four decades. This blurring of the facts to suit the message feels cavalier, as does the decision to make Cyril gay, when, in the book, he was an advocate of free love with children by different women. Moreover, the switch is awkwardly accommodated into the storyline, making the Christmas dinner showdown and its ramifications feel melodramatic rather than tragic.

The first-time scribe also struggles to incorporate Bess's biographical pursuits, as she plunges into the domestic morass without first establishing the characters. As a result, Jennifer Saunders is reduced to portraying her as a dotty old dear, while Timothy Spall was clearly overexposed to Charles Laughton's display as Edward Moulton-Barrett in Sidney Franklin's The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934). Sally Phillips is also forced down a caricaturistic cul-de-sac as sniping cousin Joan, while Jack Whitehall's William feels like a silly ass fop imported from the Fry and Laurie version of Jeeves and Wooster. Quite which milieu Lily Allen's Mary inhabits is unclear, but her determinedly anachronistic demeanour and speech patterns feel as self-conscious and distracting as the periodic eruptions of Simon Goff's synth score. Moreover, they owe nothing to Woolf, who sought to contrast Katharine and Mary's worldviews rather than making them parragons of sisterly solidarity.

Coping well with the occasionally didactic dialogue, American Haley Bennett is much better served as the spirited Katharine, although her blazing eyes more potently convey her frustrations than the ill-judged cutaways to exploding galactic matter. Indeed, director Tina Gharavi makes a number of peculiar choices in seemingly seeking to make the action more visually exciting for viewers who may not have read the book. She made a notable impact with her BAFTA-nominated debut, I Am Nasrine (2013), before accepting small-screen assignments for Channel Four and Netflix. But her overdue sophomore outing feels less adventurous and sure-footed. As critics have made decreed that making a film in the Merchant-Ivory manner is a bad thing, it's understandable that Gharavi and Waddell (who also produces) should want to distance themselves from the heritage style with a bit of handheld brio and knowing wit to go with the impeccable production and costume designs of David Hindle and Esther Walz. But they have done so at Virginia Woolf's expense and their inarguably well-intentioned and worthwhile pop at the patriarchy suffers as a result.

THE LAST VIKING.

Danish writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen has made five features with actor compatriots, Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Mads Mikkelsen. Make that six, as Flickering Lights (2000), The Green Butchers (2001), Adam's Apples (2003), Men & Chicken (2015), and Riders of Justice (2020) have now been joined by The Last Viking, which was known during its production as Back to Reality.

In an animated prologue, a Viking chieftan desperate to make his son feel better after losing an arm in battle decides to inflict the same injury upon everyone in the clan so that the youth no longer feels demoralisingly different.

Cutting to live action, we see Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) depositing a bag of cash and a gun in a railway station locker after committing a robbery. He drives to the flat shared by his siblings, Freja (Bodil Jørgensen) and Manfred (Mads Mikkelsen), and entrusts the latter with the locker key. He promptly swallows it, but agrees to bury the bag in the woods near the place where he used to have his birthday parties at their mother's house in the country. This exchange takes so long that the cops are able to track Anker down and he is arrested and 15 years pass before he is released on parole.

He is dismayed to learn that Manfred is now living with Dissociative Identity Disorder and believes he is John Lennon. Refusing to tolerate what he considers to be whim, Anker bundles his brother into the car and is stunned when he throws himself out of the passenger door and winds up in hospital. Freja tells Anker to humour him by calling him John, as he tries to harm himself every time someone uses his old name. She is also concerned that he has developed pathological obsession with stealing dogs.

Hitting a bar to relieve his frustration, Anker meets Lothar (Lars Brygmann), a psychologist who suggests that it would help Manfred reconcile personality and environment by forming a band with three other people who believe themselves to be Beatles. Anker thinks the ploy is nonsense and whisks his brother off to the family home, which is now an Airbnb run by Werner (Søren Malling) and Margrethe (Sofie Gråbøl), a fashion designer-turned-children's book illustrator and a thwarted model, who blame each other for their career failures. They get through an awkward first dinner and an incident involving John throwing himself out of a window after being called Manfred. But Margrethe takes a shine to Anker and flirts with him while on a run in the woods.

Much to Anker's annoyance, Lothar turns up with Anton (Peter Düring), who thinks he's Ringo Starr, and Hamdan (Kardo Razzazi), a Swede with a Holocaust fixation and a multi-personality disorder, who believes himself to be both Paul McCartney and George Harrison, among many others. Lothar is keen to start rehearsals right away, although it's clear that John is a much less talented musician than the other two. Indeed, Hamdan also has a Björn Ulvaeus delusion and would currently rather sing ABBA songs.

Keen to leave, Anker takes Manfred to dig up the holdall, but loses his temper when he sees that his brother has marked the spot with a rune, which could have given the hiding place away. When they start digging, however, they unearth a case containing the skull of their pet dog, which had been put down by their tyrannical father (Lars Ranthe) because Anker had failed to prevent Manfred from misbehaving in public.

Meanwhile, Anker's partner in crime, Flemming (Nicolas Bro), has tortured Freja into revealing her brother's whereabouts, although she manages to escape and comes to the old family home to warn Anker. He wakes to discover bundles of banknotes beside his bed and concludes that Lothar's wacky experiment might be working after all. Thus, when Lothar suggests that the band start wearing Sgt Pepper-style uniforms, Anker agrees if it will persuade Manfred to hand over the rest of the loot. However, the jazz-loving Werner has a row with Hamdan, who stalks off after assaulting his host with a guitar. When Lothar drives after him, Freja informs Anker that Lothar, Hamdan, and Anton have escaped from a mental health unit. Furious, Anker confronts Lothar on his return, only to be struck in the face by a frying pan.

Manfred comes to his sibling's rescue, but Anker blames him for all his troubles, dating back to their childhood. Hurt by the outburst. Manfred repairs to the barn to carve runes. Worse follows, however, when Flemming turns up demanding Anker's cash. He insists he has no idea where it is, so Flemming forces Manfred to show him. But, as they drive to the spot, Flemming uses John's birth name and he hurls himself out of the driver's seat, causing the van to flip and burst into flames.

Untying Anker in the barn, Manfred agrees to take him to the money. Instead, they dig up a case containing their father's passport and some of his clothing. This provokes a flashback in which Anker received a severe beaten for having failed to prevent Manfred from wearing a Viking helmet in the school photo. Unable to see his brother take any further punishment, Manfred had pushed their father down some stairs and Anker had finished him off with an axe for badmouthing them as he lay in agony. Disposing of the body and hiding the case in the woods, the boys had told the family that their father had run off with a woman and no one had questioned their story. These events had coincided with John Lennon's murder in New York in December 1980, thus explaining why Manfred had sought refuge in his identity.

Having put the events of four decades ago out of his mind, Anker decides to tell Freja what had happened. She is more than happy to forgive them, although they are interrupted by Lothar's return. He apologises for misleading Anker into believing that he was a dying shrink and reveals that he was traumatised by the fact his father had been the manager of the only branch of IKEA to close down. Spotting the arrow-shaped rune that Manfred had placed in a flowerbed, Anker digs down and finds the bag of cash.

Time passes and Anker, Freja, Margrethe and Werner attend a talent show, in which Manfred, Lothar, Hamdan, and Anton perform `Twist and Shout' as The Flying Beavers. Returning home, Werner discovers that Manfred has drawn Viking horns on the characters in his latest children's book. He redesigns them and his scribbling returns us to animation mode, as the chieftan is now confronted with having everyone's feet lopped off after his son loses a foot in battle. The narrator explains that they are happier than ever because of their solidarity. They even consent to being beheaded when the son is decapitated and the chieftan smiles, as the last Viking to die, because his people are all equal.

When it comes to his directorial outings, Anders Thomas Jensen could never be accused of penning by-the-book scenarios. Here, he combines noirish grit with eccentric wit to produce a hard-boiled farce. Yet, while this audaciously convoluted thriller is slickly executed, it's never exactly engaging or particularly enjoyable. This is partly down to the grimness of Anker and Manfred's parental experience. But, even though Jensen never mocks (indeed, he implies that we're all like the clan members in the Viking village), it's a lot harder in the 2020s to mine comedy from mental health conditions on screen than it was when, say, Miloš Forman swept the board at the Oscars with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Jensen has taken similar risks before, but something like Men & Chicken was shrouded in a grotesque absurdism that allowed the audience to park its discomfort. In the case of Manfred/John and his fellow Fabs, however, the dicey humour feels a bit too much on the nose.

As a curly mop top, Mads Mikkelsen clearly relishes the challenges presented by Manfred's physical awkwardness and hesitant speech patterns. But he also invests him with dignity, loyalty, and determination, while Nikolaj Lie Kaas reveals a protective side despite focussing on reining in Anker's seething rage, as what should be a simple transaction becomes more wackily complicated by the minute. The remainder of the stellar cast make the most of their moments in the spotlight, but none of the secondary characters is particularly well rounded, which is vexing in the case of Freja, as it would be useful to know how she fitted into the domestic nightmare that her brothers had endured (if she even knew much or anything about it).

Nikolaj Danielsen's production design reinforces the sense of dislocation, with the house in the woods being a real find. Rikke Simonsen's costumes are also amusing, particularly when Lothar unveils his braided Pepper tunics. Jeppe Kaas's flips neatly between being playful and ominous, but the tonal shifts are often a little abrupt and risk alienating viewers already being asked to suspend a fair amount of disbelief. Since winning the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short with Election Night (1998), Jensen has always shown a willingness to take more chances with the films he directs than those he prolifically writes for compatriots like Thomas Vinterberg, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Susanne Bier. Not everything comes off, but the fact he keeps going out on a limb makes him one of Europe's most gleefully unpredictable talents. Essentially, he's a one-man meld of Aki Kaurismäki, Joel and Ethan Coen, Roy Andersson, and Quentin Tarantino, with a dash of Quentin Dupieux sprinkled on for good measure. He can exasperate, but he can also catch you off guard and make you think and feel, when you least expect to. It's never an easy ride with Anders Thomas Jensen, but it's one you won't regret taking.