Another Round Review

Vinterberg's premise sounds like a sketch: four Danish schoolteachers test a theory that humans are born with a blood alcohol deficit and should top it up daily. The film plays it as an actual experiment, with a control condition and a logbook, which is exactly why the funny stretch is so funny and the turn so brutal. Mads Mikkelsen builds Martin out of stillness first, a history teacher who has stopped being present in his own classroom and his own marriage, and the moment the drinking starts working is played as relief rather than as comedy.

Then the theory does what theories do when the subjects badly want a particular answer. What keeps this from becoming a lecture is that Vinterberg will not disown the good parts: the loosened lessons, the restored marriage, the singing in the corridor. Thomas Bo Larsen's arc is the price the film makes you pay for that honesty. And then the ending, a jazz-ballet detour on a Copenhagen dock, is one of the great final scenes of the decade, joyous and unresolved and impossible to read as either approval or warning.