Another Round (Danish: Druk, lit. "Drinking binge") is a 2020 Danish dramedy co-written and directed by Thomas Vinterberg, and starring Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang, and Lars Ranthe.
Four middle-aged teachers and colleagues at a high school in Copenhagen, Martin (Mikkelsen), Tommy (Larsen), Peter (Ranthe) and Nikolaj (Millang), are all struggling with frustration and boredom and feelings of being trapped in their jobs and private lives. When they happen upon the works of a Norwegian psychiatrist who claims that the average human feels more comfortable and happy with a long-term blood alcohol content of 0.05%, they decide to test out his theory through an experiment of maintaining constant intoxication throughout the workday in an effort to improve their lives.
Finding that they indeed become more joyful and relaxed from being constantly tipsy, the four friends agree to gradually push their experiment further and further, testing the effects of continuous and increasingly excessive alcohol consumption on the human body and psyche.
Tropes:
- Alcohol-Induced Idiocy:
- When the teachers eventually start drinking to excess, they get wild at a local pub.
- When the drunk teens hit the town, they engage in a wide range of drunken shenanigans, including handcuffing a subway guard to a handrail.
- The Alcoholic: All members of the group know full well that their experiment may very likely result in alcoholism. In the end though, only Tommy succumbs. It's somewhat questionable if they weren't already alcoholics to begin with, given how enthusiastic they were about advancing from drinking quite a bit casually to drinking constantly in their day-to-day lives.
- Ambiguous Situation: It's left ambiguous if Tommy stumbled off his boat by accident or if he deliberately drowned himself.
- Apathetic Teacher: All four teachers are established to be bored and uninspired in their classes, resulting in bored and uninspired students.
- Binge Montage: The four teachers go through several of these. All but the last are wild and joyful. The last one is extremely unpleasant, causing all of them to realize that it's time to pull the plug.
- Bittersweet Ending: Tommy has died, but the three remaining teachers are in a better place. Martin dances with joy that his wife wants to get back together, though he gets drunk in the process and throws himself into sea.
- Call-Back: Martin holds Anika's hand while telling her that they have many years to be together. Early in the film, he referenced that their plan was to stay together until they were old and hold hands while they died.
- Cool Teacher: After getting drunk, the four teachers each become more engaged and confident. Martin in particular becomes cool to his students.
- Dedication: The film is dedicated in the closing credits to "Ida," the director's daughter, who was killed in an auto accident during filming at the age of 19. Her drinking escapades partially inspired the film, and her classmates played some of the students.
- Descent into Addiction: Tommy goes from casual drinker to alcoholic over the course of the film.
- Desk Sweep of Rage: Martin sweeps all the dinner fixings off the table after his wife admits that she cheated on him. Martin being drunk helped.
- Drinking Game: A group drinking competition among the students is a town tradition.
- Drinking on Duty: The teachers' experiment has them only drink while on duty. It's hard for them to mask the fact that they're drinking in school, causing a lot of problems.
- Drunken Song: The teachers lead a singalong at the pub when they're drinking to excess.
- Fired Teacher: Tommy gets fired for getting drunk on the job.
- Freeze-Frame Ending: The film ends with a freeze-frame on Martin as he's jumping off the pier in the middle of a drunken dance number.
- Foreshadowing: Tommy mentions early that he can't swim.
- For Science!: The teachers use the excuse of writing an academic paper about their "experiment."
- Irony: The teachers note how odd it is for the gym teacher to be the one among them who can't swim. He's also the one who owns a boat.
- Liquid Courage:
- One of the primary effects the teachers are going for is using alcohol to make them more self-confident. It actually works for a while.
- One teacher uses it on a student who is having a nervous breakdown due to having to repeat a year in school unless he passes an exam. The teacher takes him aside and have him drink to the point of going over the 0.05% point like the teachers. It works.
- Market-Based Title: The Danish name of the film is Druk, which refers to binge drinking.
- Nerd Glasses: The runt of the soccer team wears glasses and is known only as "Specs."
- Parental Substitute: Tommy becomes this to "Specs" who is implied to be bullied or at least left out by the other kids. Tommy coaches him to be an adept soccer player which wins "Specs" the respect of his peers and Tommy the respect of the team. Notably "Specs inspired the other children to sing the danish national anthem at Tommy's funeral".
- Sentimental Drunk: At low doses, all four teachers become nicer to those around them, or at least more effective at being nice.
- Title Drop: In English at least, as one of the gang says "here's another round" as they set out to reach "maximum BAC".
- Triumphant Reprise: The first piece of music heard in the film is the students singing the verse of "What a life" by Scarlet Pleasure, before the real song takes over. The song is abruptly cut by the opening credits, but is played in full during climatic dance number.
- Visual Title Drop: In Danish, the word "Druk" can be seen on the banner hanging on the truck that the graduates rode to the pier, in the last scene.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: The last thing we see of Tommy's dog is it wandering around the deck of his abandoned boat.
- Wild Teen Party: The film begins with a drinking game among the students of the school: running around the lake while drinking an entire case of beer. It's a town tradition.
