Another Round: Movie Review

Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang, Lars Ranthe

Director: Thomas Vinterberg

The re-teaming of star Mikkelsen with his The Hunt director Vinterberg produces somewhat more demure results than the tension of the 2012 film.

Druk (to give it its proper title) concerns itself with four teachers who're in the middle of their lives and the middle of a crisis. Chiefly, there's Mikkelsen's Martin, a teacher whose class is rife with indifference to his educations and whose home life is being wrecked by his nighttime working wife and sons who barely have their noses out of their phones.

When a colleague tells him of the Finn Skarderud thesis of drinking, which claims humans were born with a blood alcohol count of 0.05% lower than it should be, the four posit an experiment - to boost that limit up during daytime hours and see how effective their lives could be...

What follows is perhaps inevitable but nonetheless more pathos-filled as Martin and his friends become fuelled by alcohol and by a new joie de vivre.

There will be many a male who's affected by this tale of a loss of self-confidence and joy in mid-life and anchored as it is by Mikkelsen, the film becomes a tragic look at the seductiveness of alcoholism. 

From his saddened eyes delivering the truth of his life at a restaurant early on to the impish charm on display while he's drinking at school, Mikkelsen's subtle work pays off, where Vinterberg's film doesn't.

Outside of the four central characters, Vinterberg is loathe to sketch out more details of the supporting players - Martin's wife is fairly distant, leading to some feeling his actions are justified; and one of the other's wives who's discussed initially as perfect is turned into a shrew, nagging at her husband for supplies while she looks after their young children.

But in fairness, it's Martin's mundane life that Vinterberg's script is more interested in and the brutality of the reality of a binge-drinking culture that soaks up children and Denmark's ethos from the get go. 

The problem is that despite showing the seductiveness of the low level buzz and opening with scenes of youths swayed by binge drinking and taking part in a school competition, Another Round never really condemns the culture, nor promotes it. 

Its inability to state a position on day drinking does make it hard to see what the overall point is, other than to say stability is bad, and alcohol can help but don't overdo it and wrap it all up in a weirdly life-affirming take on existential crisis. 

These are not compelling messages, nor are they new, but were it not for a truly compelling Mikkelsen at the centre of all of this, Another Round wouldn't be the unusually watchable fare it is.