Another Round (original title: Druk) is the Danish film that snagged the Oscar for Best International Film last year. Before that, it also took home Best Film at the Danish Film Awards, alongside a slew of other prestigious honors like BAFTA, European Film Award, and London Film Festival. Unlike many Oscar-winning international films that tackle heavy-hitting themes—war, poverty, social ills, class divides, or LGBT struggles (Parasite, Roma, A Fantastic Woman, Saul Fia, Ida, Letters from Iwo Jima)—Another Round opts for something more everyday, yet explores it from a strikingly fresh angle: alcohol.
Alcohol’s a familiar trope, one that countless European and American films have tapped into or used to flesh out characters. Another Round flips the script with a quirky, bold premise: What happens when respectable high school teachers start sipping booze regularly to keep their spirits buzzing?
In Vietnam, alcohol’s as common as rice. I started drinking in 9th grade, and by 18, its taste was old news. Here, the drinking crowd is massive, and plenty of “booze hounds” guzzle until they’re smashed on the regular. But in the U.S. and parts of Europe, kids under 18 are barred from touching the stuff. Booze is a stimulant—legal, sure, but not like hard drugs—and it’s outright banned in schools. Alcohol abuse and addiction get just as much attention in American and European societies as drug addiction does. So, Another Round walks a tightrope: it toys with a touchy social issue while tossing out a wild “what if”—imagine your esteemed teachers sneaking weed to stay wired.
The film kicks off with Martin, a history teacher coasting through a humdrum life. He teaches a subject his students find dull and rigid—nobody cares what he’s saying. Worse, parents grill him over grades, insisting he should bump their kids’ scores, even though the teens couldn’t care less about his lessons.
Over dinner with his middle-aged teacher buddies, Martin gets roped into an experiment: drink a steady trickle of booze daily to maintain a 0.05 blood alcohol level. The idea? Loosen up, spark some excitement, and bring a little swagger to his lectures. It works—Martin breaks free, shedding his boredom like an old skin. He’s a new man, teaching with flair, winning over his students.
It’s not just Martin. His pals—a gym coach, a music teacher, a psych teacher—jump on the bandwagon and hit their own highs. Tommy, the P.E. coach, even turns a shy kid into the soccer team’s star scorer. For Tommy, that moment feels like he’s just coached Denmark to a World Cup win.
Martin and his crew are all wrestling with something. They’re unsatisfied, drifting through lives without clear wins, unsure of their purpose. Each has his baggage: one’s grown distant from his wife, another’s scared of his, and one never even tied the knot. Beneath their respectable teacher façades, they’re kind of losers. Then booze steps in, handing them a fresh start. In that tipsy haze, they ditch their dreary routines, blur the teacher-student line, and snag successes they’d never touched before.
You’d think these washouts had reclaimed their lives thanks to liquor, but nope. As the saying goes: a little wine’s fine, but too much spells disaster. Martin and his pals crank up the drinking, aiming for a “blowout”—total loss of control. That’s when it all spirals. One by one, they’re not using booze to dodge their midlife slumps anymore—it’s running the show, dragging them into an even darker pit. Families suffer. For Martin, being sloshed doesn’t patch things up with his wife—it shoves him further away, almost past the point of no return.
Secrets don’t stay buried. Their covert school drinking gets busted. A staff meeting’s called, the principal’s mid-lecture about hidden boozing, and in stumbles Tommy. Here’s a standout scene—and a peak for Thomas Bo Larsen as Tommy: the gym coach lurches in, plastered, wobbling, barely able to sit.
That’s the end of Tommy’s career. And, turns out, his life.
Hands down, Thomas Bo Larsen as Tommy and Mads Mikkelsen as Martin steal the show. Larsen shines in Tommy’s soccer celebration and that drunken staff meeting flop. Mikkelsen nails it with his brooding, soulful European gaze when sober, his vacant stare when drunk, and that sudden sob over a drink early on. If this weren’t a foreign-language flick but a Hollywood one, Another Round might’ve snagged Best Actor and Supporting Actor Oscars too.
The soundtrack—classic Danish tunes with a rich European vibe—clenches your heart. The filming’s loose and spontaneous, especially in scenes like Tommy coaching the team while buzzed, erupting in raw joy. Moments like that hit hard, as if the crew were riding a 0.05 buzz themselves. The warm, slightly faded tones give it an outdated film reel charm.
There’s an old saying: “borrow wine to confess love.” Here, writer-director Thomas Vinterberg borrows booze to unpack the midlife crisis. It’s about men past their prime, stuck in quiet, failed lives. It’s depression, loneliness—you might tear up comparing their solitary lows to their carefree highs, horsing around on streets and playgrounds like overgrown kids. The bitter irony? The older we get, the more we lose that childlike spark, turning into thirty- or forty-somethings with souls that died at twenty-five.
It’s not just midlife woes. The film spotlights teenage angst too—high schoolers buckling under exam pressure, grades, and graduation stress. Joyful highs weave through crises across all ages, set in Denmark, dubbed the world’s happiest country. But is that happiness just a façade?
The story wraps as the leads ditch the bottle and reclaim their lives. They realize true happiness is theirs to grasp—no booze required, especially after it killed one of them. Tommy’s death jolts them awake, even helping Martin mend his family ties. Still, liquor was their springboard out of the slump. Maybe that’s the film’s core: in life’s rough patches, a drink’s not a bad crutch—just don’t overdo it, or you’ll drown in the whirlpool.
