Another Round (Druk, 2020) does something almost impossible: it makes you root for four Danish schoolteachers who decide to maintain a constant blood-alcohol level as a philosophical experiment, and then it forces you to reckon with what that experiment actually costs. Director Thomas Vinterberg and Mads Mikkelsen are after something specific here. Not a cautionary tale and not a celebration, but an unflinching look at male midlife ennui, the gap between who you thought you would become and who you are, and the strange, brief windows when chemical loosening lets the real person through. The fan who loves this film is chasing that mixture: naturalistic performances, a story that refuses easy moral resolution, the European sensibility that treats adult unhappiness as worthy of serious cinema, and that final scene on the harbor, which is one of the great sequences in recent film. If those are the things you want, here is where to find them across every medium.
Thomas Vinterberg: The Full Picture
The director who made Another Round spent 30 years perfecting the art of watching families and communities crack under pressure.
European Cinema of Male Reckoning
Films that take grown men's quiet crises as seriously as action movies take explosions.
TV: Quiet Lives, Unquiet Minds
Series that share Another Round's patience with slow-burning adult disillusionment and the small choices that define a life.
Books: The Literature of Losing and Finding Yourself
Novels that interrogate the same territory: midlife, intoxication, male friendship, and the life unlived.
Games: Play as Someone Trying to Hold It Together
Games where the protagonist's inner life is as much the subject as the obstacles in front of them.
Music: The Sound of Longing and Release
From the film's own ecstatic final cue to the albums that carry the same emotional weight: melancholy that lifts into something almost hopeful.
The Scene on the Harbour Is Not a Happy Ending
Martin's final dance is one of the most debated sequences in recent cinema. Audiences often read it as triumphant: the man finally free, body and soul, after a year of loss. But Vinterberg has said publicly that he intended the ending to hold both readings simultaneously. Martin is ecstatic. He is also, perhaps, doing the one thing he knows how to do when pain becomes too large. The film earns the ambiguity by never resolving it. That is a harder thing to pull off than a clean catharsis, and it is the reason the film stays with you.
Mads Mikkelsen Has Been Doing This for 30 Years and Critics Noticed Too Late
The international conversation around Mads Mikkelsen often runs through Hannibal Lecter and Le Chiffre, the cold villain roles. Another Round was the moment non-Scandinavian audiences were forced to confront what Danish viewers already knew: he is one of the finest naturalistic performers alive. The classroom scenes in the film's first act, where Martin tries to reconnect with bored teenagers, are the acting showcase, not the dance. Watch the earlier Vinterberg and Susanne Bier films to understand that the Academy Award nomination for Another Round was overdue by at least a decade.
Dogme 95 Changed European Cinema More Than Hollywood Will Admit
Another Round is not a Dogme film, but it would not exist without the movement Vinterberg co-founded with Lars von Trier in 1995. The rules: no artificial lighting, no non-diegetic music, no genre films, handheld camera, location shooting only. What those constraints produced was a generation of filmmakers trained to find drama in faces and rooms rather than in production design and scoring. The restraint you feel in Another Round, the sense that the camera is simply watching people who have forgotten it is there, is Dogme's most lasting gift to cinema.
Thomas Vinterberg: A Career in Confrontation
- 1993Short film The Boy Who Walked Backwards wins at Venice, launching Vinterberg onto the international stage.
- 1995Co-founds the Dogme 95 movement with Lars von Trier, publishing the manifesto 'Vow of Chastity'.
- 1998The Celebration premieres at Cannes, wins the Jury Prize, and becomes the first Dogme film to reach global audiences. The Celebration
- 2003It's All About Love starring Joaquin Phoenix signals a costly detour into English-language prestige cinema. It's All About Love
- 2010Returns to Danish roots with the raw addiction drama Submarino.
- 2012The Hunt, with Mads Mikkelsen as a kindergarten teacher accused of abuse, wins Best Actor at Cannes and re-establishes Vinterberg as essential. The Hunt
- 2016The Commune adapts his own upbringing in a 1970s communal household.
- 2018Far from the Madding Crowd proves he can work in English without losing his feel for character. Far from the Madding Crowd
- 2020Another Round releases to international acclaim. Vinterberg's daughter Ida, who inspired the film and had a role in it, died in a car accident four days into shooting. He dedicated the film to her. Another Round
- 2021Another Round wins the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. Vinterberg is the first Danish director to win the prize.
I want to make a film about how we as a society have forgotten that it is okay to be imperfect, that there is beauty in imperfection.Thomas Vinterberg, on the making of Another Round