Another Round

Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round starts with a birthday and a theory. Four teachers at a Copenhagen secondary school meet to mark Nikolaj’s fortieth at a restaurant that serves the wine in the correct glasses, and Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), who teaches psychology, brings up a Norwegian psychiatrist’s idea that human beings are born with a blood alcohol level 0.05 per cent too low. Top it up, he says, and you become looser, braver, better company. Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) has been on the water all evening and, we gather, switched off for years. He has one glass, then several, and cries at the table. Within a week the four of them are drinking during working hours and calling it research.

It sounds like a sketch stretched to two hours, and for stretches it plays like one, but it is better than that. Mikkelsen plays the sober Martin as a man speaking from another room: shoulders down, voice flat, losing his place in a lesson on Danish kings while the class looks at its phones. The first drunk lesson, delivered after a nip in the school toilets, is a small marvel of timing. We laughed out loud at it, then noticed we were cheering on a teacher who was drunk in front of children and felt slightly odd about that. Vinterberg wants exactly that discomfort and holds it for most of the film.

The other three are cast as carefully. Thomas Bo Larsen’s Tommy, the PE teacher who coaches the smallest boys in the school and goes home to an old dog, is where the film keeps its sadness, and Larsen plays it without asking for anything. Lars Ranthe’s Peter is the music teacher, patient with his choir and with a boy called Sebastian (Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt) who cannot sit an exam without shaking. Millang’s Nikolaj has three small children and a wife who has stopped finding him funny. Maria Bonnevie, as Martin’s wife Anika, has the two or three scenes in which the film says what it is about, and she plays them without raising her voice.

Sturla Brandth Grøvlen shoots handheld and close, mostly in whatever light the rooms have: the staffroom is flat and grey, the restaurant gold, Martin’s kitchen lit by the hob. When the men drink, the camera loosens with them, drifting and swaying rather than cutting away. Anne Østerud and Janus Billeskov Jansen edit the sober stretches slowly and the drunk ones in bursts, and they punctuate the experiment with blood alcohol readings typed on screen, which is funnier than it should be. Sabine Hviid’s production design keeps everything ordinary: flat-pack shelving, a school gym, a corner sofa. Manon Rasmussen and Ellen Lens dress Martin in the tie and cardigan of a man who has stopped looking in the mirror, and let both come off as the weeks go on.

The film’s weakness is that it knows where it is going and so do we. Once 0.05 becomes 0.10 and then a night nobody can account for, the story takes the shape of most films about drinking, and some critics have called it a cautionary tale in a party hat. We half agree. Nikolaj and Peter thin out as Martin fills in, and the script by Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm never seriously tests the theory it began with; it is a pretext, and the film knows it. But Vinterberg declines to tell us how much is too much, and the Kierkegaard quotation on the poster, asking what youth and love are, is closer to his question than anything about units per week.

Vinterberg has worked with Mikkelsen and Larsen before, and this is the gentlest film he has made with either. The fury of Festen (1998) and the dread of The Hunt (2012) have been traded for something nearer affection. Mikkelsen trained as a dancer before he acted, and Vinterberg knows it, and what he does with that in the final minutes we will not describe. We can say that we came out lighter than a film holding this much grief had any right to leave us, and that the lift comes from Mikkelsen’s body rather than from anything in the script.

It runs 117 minutes, carries a 12A, and is in Danish with subtitles. Watch it with someone you have been drinking with for twenty years. Do not watch it with a glass in your hand, or do, and see how far in you get before you put it down.