Having worked with filmmakers like Nicolas Winding Refn, Thomas Vinterberg, and Nikolaj Arcel, Mads Mikkelsen has built an interesting body of collaborations over the years. One particularly notable creative partnership is with Anders Thomas Jensen. “Riders of Justice” (2020) is a fine example of that collaboration, blending action with nuanced emotion and sharply timed humour. What makes the film especially compelling is the way it uses grief and the ripple effect of events within a fast-paced yet emotionally grounded screenplay. At its core, the film also embraces the found-family dynamic, a subgenre that often brings a fragile sense of hope into broken worlds.
Riders of Justice (2020) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
Chaos Starts with a Wish
Somewhere in the small city of Tallinn, Estonia, a young girl wishes for a bicycle for Christmas. One evening, her grandfather takes her to a shop to look at one. She is first shown a red bicycle, but she prefers a blue one. Her grandfather gently teases her, reminding her that Christmas is still a long way off and she may or may not get it, but the little girl holds on to the hope that her wish will come true. They leave the shop (more like a roadside shop) and move on with their evening, unaware that this small moment, shaped by a simple choice and a child’s innocent wish, will set off a chain of events that ends in tragedy and changes the lives of a grieving family and a few strangers forever.
The shopkeeper then calls one of his associates to arrange the blue bicycle, and from there the film begins to reveal how one minor decision can trigger a domino effect. The bicycle is not sourced from a regular supplier or retail outlet, but from a thief. That stolen bicycle belongs to Mathilde, who usually rides it to school. When it goes missing, her mother decides to drop her off instead. Already frustrated, Mathilde grows more irritated by her mother’s broken car and the general disorder of the morning. The chain of events continues to disrupt the routine of both mother and daughter.
As if the day had not already started badly enough, Mathilde receives yet another disappointment when her mother tells her that her father may have to spend three more months away in the military. To lift her mood, Mathilde’s mother suggests that they take the day off, walk to the train, and spend some time together in the city. The small attempt to comfort a disappointed daughter soon becomes part of a far larger and more devastating sequence of events.
Coincidence Is Merely Insufficient Data
On that same day, while Mathilde and her mother are unknowingly being pushed out of their normal routine, the film also introduces Otto and his friend Lennart. Otto has just failed to convince a board about the value of an algorithm they have been developing, one that can classify people’s choice of cars based on their income and tax returns and, more importantly, identify patterns that may help predict future events.
The board remains unconvinced, pointing out that despite spending 46 weeks on the project, Otto’s presentation does not justify the effort behind it. Otto tries to argue that the true purpose of the algorithm is not merely to sort consumer habits but to show that events are not random at all. According to him, “every event is the product of preceding events, and what people call coincidence is often just a lack of sufficient data.”
But this line of thinking fails to impress the board, and his larger argument about cause, pattern, and prediction is dismissed. Frustrated, Otto clears his desk and takes a train home, the very same train Mathilde and her mother have boarded. Otto notices Mathilde’s mother and offers her his seat. Mathilde, amused by the small gesture, teases her mother and hints that the man may be interested in her. For a brief moment, the film allows a sense of lightness and warmth to settle between them. But that tenderness vanishes in an instant when the train compartment explodes.
Otto survives only because he gave up his seat. The seat he had offered is the one Mathilde’s mother accepted, and she dies in the blast. Soon after, Mathilde’s father, Markus, receives the news. He cancels his military plans, returns home, and tries to be there for his daughter. But father and daughter do not naturally understand each other. Markus is strict, emotionally distant, and often overly conscious of Mathilde’s health and weight. On top of that, neither of them knows how to process the loss, where to direct their grief, or whom to blame for the tragedy that has shattered their lives.
Police Did Not Trust Otto’s Claim
Otto becomes increasingly restless as he keeps replaying the events that led up to the train explosion. The more he thinks about the sequence of events preceding the blast, the more convinced he becomes that it was not an accident, but a carefully planned act of murder. He then goes to the police station and tries to explain that there are too many signs for this to be dismissed as a mere accident.
To Otto, it is too suspicious that a key witness in a homicide case involving a violent gang dies in a train explosion, especially when that witness’s lawyer had also died in another so-called accident just thirteen days earlier. Yet the police do not take Otto seriously. Otto’s reasoning sounds obsessive rather than persuasive to the police.
From his calculations and observations, however, he notices something else: a man seen on CCTV leaving the train compartment shortly before the explosion. To Otto, that detail is crucial. He suspects the man may have planted the bomb. When the police ask how he can be so certain about an unknown passenger who simply got off the train, Otto points to a small behavioural clue. The man had bought an expensive Joe & The Juice sandwich and a large drink, yet left without finishing them and threw them away.
To Otto, that is not normal behaviour; no one spends that kind of money on food only to abandon it midway unless something more urgent is at play. The police, however, remain unconvinced. For them, Otto’s theory is still built on inference rather than hard proof, and they insist that there is no concrete physical evidence strong enough to overturn the official conclusion that the explosion was an accident. Otto then tries to approach Mathilde after seeing her alone in the hospital following the tragedy. Instead, he meets her father, Markus, and explains both how he knows Mathilde and why he believes the train explosion was no accident.
Otto’s suspicions point to the fact that the man who left the compartment before the blast had been sitting near biker gang member John “The Eagle” Ulrichsen, who was also on the train. With the help of his friend Lennart, Otto pulls together a wide range of information, from phone records to medical files, and presents it all to Markus. At first, Markus struggles to see the full picture. But Otto gradually explains how the pieces connect. According to his findings, Ulrichsen suffers from OCD, and it is not uncommon for him to choose the same seat whenever he travels.
On top of that, he has an extensive criminal record, including several assaults linked to incidents on train lines. One record even suggests that he once punched an old man in the face for refusing to give up his seat. Taken together, these medical and criminal details lead Otto and Lennart to believe that Ulrichsen was the real target, and that the so-called accident may have been an assassination attempt connected to the Riders of Justice gang.
Riders of Justice (2020) Movie Ending Explained:
Using Emmenthaler’s facial recognition algorithm, the group identifies the man who had left the train compartment before the explosion. Even then, Emmenthaler remains unconvinced. Though the algorithm gives them a 95 percent match, he is uncomfortable acting on it and insists that he would trust it more only if the accuracy were somewhere around 98 or 99 percent. The others, however, argue that the probability is strong enough, especially after narrowing the search to Danish territory.
At first, the stronger result had pointed to Egypt, but the statistically minded men dismissed that possibility, reasoning that the suspect is unlikely to have escaped there. The man they identify in Denmark also has a criminal record, which further convinces the group to move ahead. Markus, still consumed by grief and anger and wanting revenge more than certainty, takes the three men with him to confront the suspect at the address they found online.
When they arrive to interrogate the man for more information about the accident, he refuses to answer their questions. Markus, driven more by rage than reason, kills him without hesitation. Almost immediately, there is a sense that even he realises this killing may have been premature, or perhaps unnecessary. Afterwards, Lennart is sent in to wipe fingerprints and clear traces from the scene. Inside, he finds a male Ukrainian sex worker tied up in a submissive position. Lennart and the others later rescue him during the escalating conflict with the gang. In time, this unexpected survivor becomes part of the strange found family the film gradually assembles around grief, violence, and damaged people struggling to hold on to one another.
So, Was the Accident Just a Coincidence?
Markus wants his newly found friends to continue hunting the Riders of Justice gang. To him, taking down the entire gang feels like the only way to avenge his wife. But Lennart soon realises, through Bodashka, that the man Markus killed may not have been the one they were looking for at all. Bodashka mentions that the man had recently arrived on a flight from Germany.
That detail raises an obvious question: how could someone who had just flown in have been on the train and responsible for the explosion? The possibility of such a mistake breaks Markus further. He begins blaming Otto and the others for everything, including the killing of the wrong man and the bloodshed that followed. The group gradually understands that the man they found using the algorithm was likely just a tourist from Egypt. The revenge of the previous day suddenly turns into the crime of the present.
Now they have nothing left that can truly justify what they have done or console Markus in any meaningful way. Mathilde, meanwhile, becomes increasingly worried about her father. At first, when Otto and his friends kept appearing around Markus, she had been told that Otto felt awkward and guilty for giving up his seat to her mother, while Lennart and Emmenthaler were mistaken for social workers. But the group’s strange behaviour, their lies, and Markus’s worsening instability make Mathilde suspicious.
Before anyone can explain what is really happening, she begins quietly following the group and watching where her father goes, convinced that he has become even more of a stranger since these men entered their lives. Markus breaks further after realising that he may have killed the wrong men, men who might have had no responsibility for the train blast at all. For the first time, he begins to accept that the tragedy may indeed have been an accident.
The Breadcrumbs
But it is too late now, because the biker gang finds Markus and his friends. Their first clue comes from Bodashka. When Lennart had earlier found him tied up, he kept shouting Emmenthaler’s name, and Bodashka later remembered it when the gang captured and tortured him. That name gives the gang a way to trace the group. They also gain another clue through Otto, whose disabled arm makes him easier to identify.
A further lead comes through Mathilde’s boyfriend, who one day posts a photo on Instagram of Mathilde and Otto playing chess. One of his followers happens to be the gang leader’s daughter, and through that post, they are able to locate Markus’s address. Bodashka is later rescued, but by then Markus has already taken down several members of the biker gang, further provoking the gang leader. The conflict finally reaches Markus’s home, and what follows is chaos. Though a few of them are wounded, almost everyone manages to survive the attack.
Markus, once again, becomes a one-man force and takes down most of the gang members by himself. But the real danger is Mathilde, who is caught at gunpoint by the gang leader. At that crucial moment, Otto and his friends, men who have never really been shooters, arrive and fire back in panic. That brief distraction gives Markus the chance he needs to finish off the remaining attackers and save his daughter.
In the days that follow, Christmas arrives. The strange found family that the film has slowly built now gathers together to celebrate it. Each of them has lost something in life, yet they have somehow found a way to keep moving forward with one another. And somewhere else, the little girl who once wished for a blue bicycle finally gets her wish. She rides it joyfully through a snow-covered road, unaware of the long and tragic chain of events her small desire had unknowingly set into motion in the lives of Mathilde and the others.
Riders of Justice (2020) Movie Themes Analysed:
Handling Grief
When Mathilde’s boyfriend confronts Markus, shortly after being hit by him, he suggests that a man’s profession often shapes the way he reacts to pain. His point is that, if Markus had been an athlete, he might have dealt with grief by running more, but because he is a soldier, his pain comes out through anger and violence. Markus, in turn, fires back with a harsher example, suggesting that a soldier is trained to respond to a threat instantly.
The scene is tense, but it also carries a mild and subtle comic relief. More importantly, it hints at one of the film’s central ideas: people do not grieve in the same way. Profession may shape behaviour to an extent, but so do childhood experiences, habit, temperament, and the routines that build a person over time.
Finding Missing Pieces
When Mathilde’s mother dies, Mathilde tries to make sense of the tragedy using the details she can remember. With sticky notes, she traces back the chain of events that led her and her mother onto the train that exploded. This is her way of trying to understand what happened. Similarly, Markus tries to avenge his wife by hunting down those he believes are responsible, only to realise in the end that the tragedy may have been just an accident. None of our actions can truly resolve anything, nor can they fully answer why such a tragedy occurred.
As Otto explains to Mathilde, every event she traces back is itself connected to a larger event before it, and each of those events, in turn, has its own origin and chain behind it. In that sense, it becomes statistically impossible to trace every path back far enough to arrive at one final and satisfying answer for grief. Even gathering that much data, let alone processing it fully, is unrealistic for the human mind, no matter how advanced we believe our technology to be.
Grief does not work like mathematics. Emotions are what set human beings apart, at least from the forms of life we currently know. On the vast scale of the cosmos, it is almost impossible to imagine encountering another advanced civilisation that could teach us how to live without grief, or free us from the burden of emotion altogether. Or perhaps one day we may even create a more advanced version of ourselves, one that no longer has to process or carry emotion in the way we do. But until such a distant possibility exists, grief remains something deeply human, something that cannot be answered through cold calculation alone.
At such moments, perhaps the only real comfort one person can offer another is emotional support, simply being there and helping them endure the pain. That is where “Riders of Justice” (2020) becomes quietly moving beneath its violence and dark humour. The three nerdy strangers who enter Markus’s life do not just help him seek revenge or pursue justice when the system fails him.
They also become an unexpected emotional support system for both him and Mathilde. In that sense, the found family Mathilde gains by the end is larger than the small family she once had. It cannot replace the absence of her mother, nor erase the grief that shaped her. But it does offer something equally important: a reason to keep moving forward, for both Mathilde and her father.
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