The joy and melancholy of booze blend in this deep, rich film

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Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) has hit a deep mid-life crisis. He and his wife (Maria Bonnevie) rarely talk, and their two boys are sullen. His students think he’s crap because he is: a history teacher who has forgotten he used to love history. His students even call a meeting to tell him how disappointing he is (this is Denmark, after all).

His friend, Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), who teaches psychology, has problems of his own − two young children who wet the bed at night. Unfortunately, they sleep in the same bed as their parents. Peter (Lars Ranthe), the music teacher, would love to have a family but can’t talk to women. And Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), sports master, is lonesome, cranky and burnt out.

They make a pact: they will keep their alcohol level constant at .05 but follow Hemingway’s rules: no drinking after 8pm or on weekends. Their lives immediately take a turn for the better. Martin rediscovers his mojo, and his students respond with enthusiasm. Tommy becomes kinder and more tolerant of his young athletes (the pissants, he calls them). Peter finds his music teaching becomes more passionate and committed. Let’s up the daily dose to .10, they agree, to see if they might function at an even higher level.

There is some quiet comedy about all this but the film never breaks into the open plains of mirth. That’s because it has a deep and rich lode of melancholy to mine. The reasons for this are quite personal, and not spelled out on screen, except in the film’s final dedication: to Ida.

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Thomas Vinterberg wrote a play about alcohol some years ago while working at a theatre in Vienna. He had reshaped it with input from his daughter who told him stories about the drinking culture of young Danes. Ida was to play the lead character’s daughter. Four days into filming, she was killed in a car accident. The film was literally made through the veil of the director’s grief. He reshaped it again to explore both the highs and lows of alcohol, its place in Danish culture, and much more − and that excursion beyond mere alcohol is where the gold is.

The film has a strange kind of grace, a sense of weight, made more powerful by Mikkelsen’s haunting performance. At first, drinking reawakens Martin’s spirit and rekindles his honesty, then it exposes the cracks in his marriage. “In vino veritas” can become destructive.

The Danish title is Druk, which refers to binge-drinking. Bender might have been a more literal English title, although Another Round still carries some joy, a sense of the conviviality of drinking.

Vinterberg chooses not to lecture and that will be controversial. With all the destruction and misery that follows alcohol abuse, some will want a clear denunciation. Vinterberg shows plenty of downsides, as these four men lose control of the experiment, but he keeps returning to the example of Winston Churchill, who never met a drink he didn’t like. Hitler, Martin reminds his class, was a teetotaller. There is a funny montage at one point of world leaders in their cups in public: Yeltsin dancing, Brezhnev blotto, Sarkozy slurring.

The images remind us that drinking makes us all stupid, some of the time. And at other times, it makes us happy, eloquent, bold, sometimes even brilliant. Vinterberg takes a nuanced view, in other words. This is most definitely a glass half full.