A reunion between director Thomas Vinterberg and his star of the 2012 drama The Hunt is a flippant and very, very drunken story of an unusual experiment
The Danish title is “Druk”, a term which is maybe best translated by adding the letter N before the one at the end. Here it is the rather more quaint Another Round. Thomas Vinterberg’s film, reuniting him with
Actor Mads Mikkelsen (who starred in his drama The Hunt in 2012) is a slightly flippant tragicomedy of booze and midlife defiance, based on a pseudoscientific theory which put me in mind of Humphrey Bogart’s bleary dictum about the rest of the world being three drinks behind. People spend a lot of time in this film getting very, very drunk and maybe in the wacky traditions of Denmark’s Zentropa Studios, the actors were indeed required to get genuinely hammered before the cry of “Action!”
The smoulderingly impassive Mikkelsen plays Martin, a high-school history teacher at an institution where the teens imbibe their drinking ethic early on, with an OTT drinking game they play on graduating, and learn to associate binge drinking with youthful health and happiness. Martin hangs out a bit with three other morose middle-aged teachers: Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), Peter (Lars Ranthe) and Nikolaj (Magnus Millang). They are all pretty underpar these days, but Martin seems especially to have lost his mojo, mumbling and stumbling his way through lessons in ways that alarm the students.