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.