Another Round review – the performance of a lifetime from Mads Mikkelsen | Drama films

Tragedy, comedy and Kierkegaard collide just like the highs and lows of an alcohol binge in Thomas Vinterberg’s newest, which received the Bafta for finest movie not within the English language, and Oscar for finest worldwide characteristic. Mischievously unruly in tone (“scandalous” is Vinterberg’s most popular phrase), but shot via with a flinty shard of unhappiness, it’s the Danish director’s best and most private movie since 1998’s Festen – a heady cocktail of ecstasy and grief, buoyed by an excellent ensemble forged. On the centre of its maddening spell is a magnificently modulated efficiency by Mads Mikkelsen, who excelled in Vinterberg’s 2012 drama The Hunt, and gives right here the efficiency of a lifetime in a job that sees him dancing (actually) via the guts of darkness.

Mikkelsen is Martin, a bored, detached high-school trainer who, like his closest colleagues, is trapped within the creeping throes of a midlife disaster – a sense that the glass is now half empty. Impressed by Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud’s suggestion that the human physique has an inbuilt alcohol deficiency, Martin and three shut associates embark on a reckless experiment: to see if daytime consuming can assist them change into higher variations of themselves – to be taught to dwell once more.

Just like the Dogme 95 manifesto that Vinterberg cooked up with Lars von Trier, the principles below which this experiment will probably be performed are each extreme and absurd. Most significantly, the quartet conform to abandon night or weekend consuming, limiting their intoxication to the office – a minimum of initially. As for the quantities they devour, these will probably be strictly monitored and recorded in a pseudo-academic doc, extracts from which seem on-screen.

At first the experiment yields constructive outcomes, with small intakes of alcohol producing large modifications (“I haven’t felt this good in ages”). Free of the anxieties of sobriety, the buddies discover themselves extra lucid, extra communicative, extra spontaneous. However inevitably, as their consumption goes up, so the advantages go down, leaving them spiralling towards self-destruction.

Whether or not it’s The Misplaced Weekend or Leaving Las Vegas, cinema’s relationship with alcohol has lengthy been a conflicted mixture of fascination and revulsion. Throughout the canon of display drunkenness, it’s onerous to think about one other movie that captures the marginally elevated euphoria of consuming as exactly as this – from its joyous “lake run” opening (a pupil ritual involving frantic, on-the-hoof beer consuming) to a thrillingly harmful alfresco jazz dance quantity (you’ll imagine a person can fly). But just like the sensible pianist who, we’re instructed, may solely play “on the actual level of being neither drunk nor sober”, this quartet are concerned in a precarious balancing act, with bloodied hangovers, damaged households and worse awaiting those that fall.

One other Spherical is devoted to Ida, Vinterberg’s 19-year-old daughter, who died in a automobile crash simply as manufacturing started, however whose vibrant spirit clearly infuses the movie. “Having simply misplaced a life,” Vinterberg instructed me, shortly after being Oscar-nominated for finest director, “the celebratory, life-affirming component grew to become extraordinarily necessary.” Fittingly, whereas Vinterberg could describe One other Spherical as present inside the “fully bare, blunt and at instances improvised intimacy” of movies similar to John Cassavetes’s Husbands and A Warfare, by his common co-writer Tobias Lindholm, there may be additionally a counterbalancing air of the carnivalesque, harking back to the exuberance of Federico Fellini.