Another Round (Druk)

There’s a brilliant sketch in That Mitchell & Webb Look where the Illuminati explain, whilst inducting a new member, that they run the world behind the scenes by keeping themselves, at all times, ‘as tipsy as you get after a glass and a half of wine.’ They decree that this is the optimum performance level of humans and anything above this leads to ruin.

It’s definitely not the basis for the brilliant Another Round (or Druk to give it its Danish title) but the premise is much the same: four middle-aged, slightly world-weary high school teachers indulge in a Danish psychiatrist’s theory that the human body generally has less than the required blood-alcohol level for optimum performance. As you can imagine, this starts with a little pep-me-up shot of vodka before taking a class before building to ‘how-far-can-we-take-this’ levels.

There’s a lot of ways this could have gone but Director and writer Thomas Vinterberg perfectly tows the line between moral message, life-affirming pick me up, comedy and drama to capture that the alcohol itself is not the point, more the outlook on life that such an experiment can offer and, if handled in the right way, experience can be heightened by such a theory.

Inevitably, each of the four takes a slightly different path and it’ll show each viewer what they need to see and hear in regards to how they view their own lives.

The cast are uniformly excellent, with Mads Mikkelsen headlining in his native language. His brooding and melancholic Martin has a glimpse of a sparkle behind his eye and his arc is given the most time across the film and culminates in an entirely unexpected, strange but unique and life-affirming ending.

It’s a pretty damn unique film all in all actually, with a smorgasbord of tones and some brilliant bait and switches between hysterical humour and sheer sadness, much as the average night out can give you.

Sadly, the general ignorance of much of the British public will mean that, with this film being in Danish with subtitles, it probably won’t get much of a wide release here. In its native country a huge amount of the population (around 10%) went to see it and it’d be fantastic if the same happened here – it has a lot to say about drinking culture and the benefits and drawbacks of alcohol without being preachy so give it a shot (pun intended) as it’s absolutely intoxicating.

4 stars ****