Another Round (2020)

Director: Thomas Vinterberg

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

Primary genre: Black comedy

Secondary genre: Drama

Nominated for: Best director, International film feature

Won: International film feature

Marking their second collaboration after “The Hunt” (2012), Thomas Vinterberg and Mads Mikkelsen attempt this time around something lighter with “Another Round”.

Avoiding the typical conventions of melodrama, the story could easily have described how the reliance on alcohol consumption is bad for you. Yet, Vinterberg’s script treats it as an essential catalyst for someone’s life (literally and metaphorically). Throughout several sequences of drinking a variety of spirits, cocktails, beers and shots, four friends seek to test a psychological hypothesis that being (slightly) drunk is a a natural state for our brain, unlocking our social and intellectual potential.

It is an intriguing premise developing the story in mature ways that lack the puritanical emphasis seen in the US cinema. The emphasis here is not to demonstrate how this newly behavioral adoption can alter someone’s life but to bring back to life stoically a quiet (and secretly discontent) man. “Another Round” proclaims that there is a difference knowing the path and walking the path and sometimes takes the high ground. As Martin, a late 40s high school teacher, Mikkelsen is absolutely sensational, an epitome of underlying unhappiness, masqueraded through a pleasant and undetected to others apathy, a silently defeated individual who many men of similar age will deeply related to.

Although the focus is mainly on Martin, the rest of his friends (all equally excellent) are being given enough material to highlight the state of their lives, each having a different take to their problems and social relationships. We invest deeply to these authentic, next door type characters who lack glorified traits, their friendship being the magnetic core which pulls them together whether they are listening to Martin’s heartfelt confession or dancing drunk to The Meters’ “Cissy Strut”, showcasing how rewarding human connections are in an era where individuals digitally isolate themselves.

Although the characterizations of Martin’s family (particularly his wife) verge on cliché territory, the film’s sophisticated for its subject matter approach is to be commended - a montage of tipsy world leaders being tipsy is both beautiful and smile inducing. Vinterberg resists hard to avoid banal tropes of virtue signaling by neither condemning or celebrating the drinking culture of Denmark. Instead, alcoholism is used as a cinematic vehicle to tell a mid life crisis story that will touch people’s hearts with its honesty and lack of an emotional manipulative moral compass. Its invigorating finale is one of this decade’s magnificent moments, a liberative sequence that affirms how just truly beautiful cinema can be.

Danish cinema at its finest

+Mikkelsen is sensational

+Engaging story

+Meaningful outcome

+Authentic and relatable

+Brilliant finale

-Not for those who despise booze

-Minor cliche elements