Another Round (2020)

Thomas Vinterberg's Another Round arrives with a Best International Feature Oscar and the somber distinction of being dedicated to the director's daughter, Ida, who died four days into production. The premise is simple. Four Copenhagen high school teachers, led by a magnificently weary Mads Mikkelsen, decide that a sustained blood alcohol level of 0.05 percent will restore the creative spark that middle age has extinguished. What follows is a controlled experiment in uplift and its slow unraveling. The cast is uniformly white, uniformly Danish, and uniformly male at its center. No casting directive intrudes. No identity is announced.

The film concerns itself with stagnation, friendship, and the quiet catastrophe of a life that has stopped surprising its owner. The wives drift at the margins, present as weather rather than thesis. Race never surfaces as a subject. Neither does climate, nor economic grievance, nor the body as a political site. This is a character drama that observes its subjects with patience and refuses to instruct the audience on how to feel. Tommy's drowning lands without a moral attached. Martin's final dance, a burst of jazz ballet and saltwater, reads as catharsis or collapse, and Vinterberg declines to say which.

Scan the running time for a sermon and nothing surfaces. The film is melancholic, dryly funny, and entirely indifferent to the cultural currents that reshaped so much anglophone output of its era. It stands as a reminder that a serious drama about sad men drinking can be morally engaged without being preachy. A clean sheet, then, and a rare one. The sommelier sets down the glass and finds nothing to swirl.