Another Round

Directed by Thomas Vinterberg

Running time: 1hr57 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Mads Mikkelsen stars in Another Round

Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round is a funny and thoughtful piece of cinema about a group of schoolteachers who decide to experiment with the premise that life would be better if we were always very slightly drunk. Just first-drink-drunk, mind you. A little buzzed; not hammered. At its heart, it’s a film about drinking alcohol — and the fantasies that surround the practice. This is a film that replies “yes, and…” to the suggestions of the companies that sell alcohol that the right drink is a marker of sophisticated taste, that it lubricates socialising, bonds groups, envelopes you in a cosy sensation of bonhomie, improves confidence, and is a necessary complement to a good meal. “Yes,” says Another Round, “alcohol can be part of all of those things… and what else does it do?” 

As someone currently on day 250-something of a year-long experiment with not drinking, the film felt to me like a canny, clear-eyed affirmation of the temptations and pleasures of alcohol, but also of the downsides. Another Round views alcohol from the perspective that it is a drug, albeit a drug whose use is normalised, but equally, Vinterberg’s film doesn’t adopt a puritanical approach to drug use. This balance is rare in films about mind-altering substances. Trainspotting is the classic example as far as heroin is concerned; you watch that film and it shows you characters experiencing heroin pleasurably, as well as sliding into squalor and disgrace. 

Another Round isn’t a linear descent into disgrace, though — it captures the cyclical nature of drinking. Perhaps there’s a reason a round is called a round. There’s certainly a “here we go again” quality to any regular drinker eagerly contemplating another sesh, from that first drink that takes the edge off, through to the hangover, and then the repeat of that first drink that takes the edge off — but takes the edge off what, exactly? Vinterberg observes the sharp edges wittily; we get a good sense of what it is that his middle class, middle-aged characters feel the need to blunt and soften with a drink at the end of their day. Or at lunchtime.

There is a superb climax in the film that plays to me as a fantasy, a visualisation of how people feel sometimes when they drink, and not how they actually come across. But it’s ambiguous. How you see it when you watch it will be very much coloured by the strength of your beer goggles prescription. Cheers!

ANOTHER ROUND (2020) Written by Thomas Vinterberg, Tobias Lindholm | Shot by Sturla Brandth Grøvlen | Edited by Janus Billeskov, Jansen Anne Østerud

In cinemas now.