Another Round, review: a sozzled Mads Mikkelsen turns day-drinking into an art

• Dir: Thomas Vinterberg. Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang, Lars Ranthe, Maria Bonnevie, Helene Reingaard. 12A cert, 117 min

“Boozing”. “Binge drinking”. “Drinking culture”. None would function too elegantly as film titles, but all are rough translations of the Danish word “druk”, from which Thomas Vinterberg’s deliberate debauch of a new film – which won the Best International Feature Oscar – takes its name.

To say that Vinterberg (Festen, The Hunt) has taken on the social and professional effects of getting hammered makes this sound like more of an academic thesis than a frisky comic drama. It finds sobriety consistently hard to stomach. But it also turns its theme into a kind of experiment, testing an obscure theory by Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud that all humans carry around a blood-alcohol level 0.05 per cent too low.

When we first hear this notion advanced, a quartet of teachers are gathered for a high-end 40th birthday dinner in Copenhagen, with three of them well on the way to merriment. Only reformed hellraiser Martin (a sterling Mads Mikkelsen) is sitting out the booze with a soda water, plagued by the sense that he’s fading into a dull, middle-aged lethargy.

His students in history class have checked out, perhaps because he evidently has too, reading out dreary textbook chunks about the industrial revolution, muddling up the world wars. The old Martin, who was the life and soul, has turned into a depressive zombie whose friends egg him on to at least sample the champagne. Or if not that, then the vodka for their caviar pairing. And with a tragic inevitability, he caves.

The trouble is stopping. The next morning, he sneaks a pint of Smirnoff into school and swigs before class in a loo cubicle. There’s a sudden spark to his lesson – ears prick up, bored faces smile. When he reveals his thinking to the other conspirators – psychology teacher and father of three Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), music head Peter (Lars Ranthe) and divorced sports coach Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen) – they eagerly get on board.

Their scheme is to cancel out that Skårderud deficit on a daily basis, strictly within working hours, and see what happens. Coffee thermoses and water bottles are duly primed. It’s Nikolaj’s idea to take notes, as if they were justifying the whole charade as scientific research. Lessons about Churchill and Hemingway focus on their epic achievements as famed drinkers, and Peter puts on a recording of the concert pianist Klaus Heerfordt, who could only perform when not entirely sober.

Apart, these four men are glum and trapped, managing tired relationships and other problems. Together, they’re a childishly irrepressible unit who can’t help push things too far, with little heed to the consequences.

It hardly takes much thought to debunk Skårderud’s idea, which he later disowned as a throwaway remark. By the time the men are waking up with inexplicable injuries on the street, or having wet the bed, its problems are more than obvious. Alcohol might beget a glittering joie de vivre, a “musicality”, as the script nicely puts it, and a window of oblivion, but what it principally begets is more alcohol.

Vinterberg and his regular co-writer Tobias Lindholm (A War) intend their film as a fondly patriotic celebration of living. But their thinking gets a bit stuck, because they simply give in to the same polarised impulses as all the characters. The joyous moments of hedonistic lift-off, for young and old alike, always go hand-in-hand with inebriation. The film’s images are either silly-drunk or sober-regretful – dour staff meetings galore – with none of life’s other joys to spike the punch.

Even if it springs few genuine revelations, this loping sine wave of a film still lands as an honest take on the high highs and low lows of a sodden Scandinavian lifestyle. It scores best in showing how male-group peer pressure dictates drinking as an exhausting necessity, whatever the pretext might be. The ironies of raising a glass at a funeral to a suicidal alcoholic are lost on no one.

All four of the leads are damn good, with Millang especially nailing the grotty fumbling and squinting-away-from-the-light disgrace of a boyish dad on the morning after. Meanwhile, Mikkelsen – who was the best thing by far in Vinterberg’s mass-hysteria drama The Hunt – gives a beautifully detailed account of someone who's flattened his whole personality to dry out. Every long-awaited gulp makes him look almost naked with surrender, and when he acrobatically lets rip, in a harbourside dance routine to euphoric Europop, it’s a moment to crown the career clip-reel. Slovenly though the film’s thesis gets, he’s perfect.

In cinemas from Friday