If you’ve spent any time on social media, you’ve probably seen the final moments of Another Round. No spoilers here, but it’s an unforgettable, invigorating end note to Thomas Vinterberg’s delicious Danish comedy-drama that takes its characters and the audience on a journey that’s by turns funny then dark, and ends up somewhere else completely. It’s a terrific high concept for a movie — four weary teachers try an experiment that argues everything in life is better if you constantly have 0.5% alcohol in your system — but Vinterberg, writer Tobias Lindholm and a pitch-perfect cast breathe boozy life and texture into the idea, creating a film that flits between farce and melancholy to create a nuanced picture of the joys and pains of the demon drink. An American do-over is reputedly in the works with Leonardo DiCaprio — don’t hold your breath, the Toni Erdmann US reboot is still nowhere in sight— but it’s hard to believe it will hit the notes Vinterberg finds effortlessly.
Another Round — the original title Druk, Danish for a bender, is better — reunites Vinterberg, Lindholm and Mikkelsen after 2012’s The Hunt. In that one, Mikkelsen played a kindergarten teacher wrongly accused of being a paedophile. Here he moves up the Danish educational system to play secondary-school history teacher Martin, whose work life and home life have lost their spark. Meeting with similarly lacklustre colleagues — sports teacher Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), music head Peter (Lars Ranthe) and ringleader Nikolaj (Magnus Millang) — at a raucous birthday dinner, the oldies hatch a plan inspired by Norwegian psychologist Finn Skårderud’s controversial thesis that most people go through life with too little alcohol in their bloodstream. Citing some famous functioning alcoholics (Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway), the four make a pact to stay low-level drunk all day, monitoring and recording the results with scientific empiricism.
From here the narrative shape is predictable but beautifully done. For its first half, it spins the idea for fun and japes — Vinterberg playfully splices in montages of drunk world leaders as outliers for the tone — as the four teachers find their lives invigorated by a smidgeon of alcohol; Tommy, smuggling booze onto a football pitch in a plastic sports bottle, brings the best out of an ostracised player; Peter leads his pupils in rousing sing-songs in-between secret swigs of alcohol; and Martin revitalises not only his days — there’s a lovely moment where he performs some nifty dance moves in a staff room — but also his nights, his kids suddenly paying him attention, his wife seeing him with fresh eyes. “I haven’t felt this good in ages,” he tells his cohorts, so the group decide to up the ante and increase their daily alcohol consumption. Big mistake.
Of course, there are consequences as careers, marriages and lives suffer; a baby monitor is mistaken for a breathalyzer, and a pupil offered booze to settle his exam nerves. It’s perhaps surprising given Vinterberg’s nose for shock and controversy that he takes the moral high ground here, but the result is a familiar but more mature, nuanced take on the dangers of drinking. Vinterberg is aided by a great cast led by a never-better Mikkelsen, nailing Martin’s arc from disillusioned to rejuvenated to dissolute to something else entirely. And his final moments (hint: Mikkelsen was a young gymnast) go beyond meme-status to become something transcendent.