An unrewarding slog: Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round reviewed

Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round has been heaped with awards: an Oscar, a Bafta, it swept the European Film Awards. And it has received rave reviews everywhere. I must now work out, I suppose, why I found it such a hard, boring, unrewarding, annoying slog. I did have a stern talk with myself, and even watched it again, but with the same result. I suppose your enjoyment may depend on how much time you might wish to spend with drunk middle-aged men who imagine they are being interesting. Or have you been trapped at parties by too many of them down the years?

The film is co-written by Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm, and directed by Vinterberg, whose Festen (1998) hasn’t ever budged from my top ten films of all time. It is set in Denmark and stars Mads Mikkelsen, and his compelling cheekbones, as Martin, a depressed, closed-down history teacher who, as we see at the outset, sleepwalks through delivering his lessons and sleepwalks through dinner with his wife and children. He has three best friends — Nicolaj (Magnus Millang), Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), Peter (Lars Ranthe) — who are also discontented teachers unable to cope with no longer being young and full of promise. They all get roaringly drunk at a 40th birthday dinner for Nicolaj even if, at first, Martin, who isn’t much of a drinker, sips water. But his friends urge him on. It’s: ‘Martin, come on, Russia was built by people who drank vodka!’ And: ‘We’ll have a really good bottle of wine for Martin!’

It’s at this dinner that Nicolaj puts forward the theory of real-life Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skarderud who has said that humans are born ‘alcohol-depleted’ and should maintain an intoxication level of 0.05