SPIRIT LEVEL (ANOTHER ROUND)

There's a moment in Thomas Vinterberg's 'Druk (Another Round)' where Mads Mikkelsen's history teacher presents his students with an imaginary election scenario.

There are three male candidates to choose from.

The first is partially paralysed and has hypertension, anemia and a number of other illnesses. 

He cheats on his wife, drinks martinis, smokes, lies if it suits and consults astrologists while making political decisions.

The next is overweight, has lost three elections, is prone to depression and has had heart attacks, smokes cigars, drinks heavily and takes two sleeping pills.

The final candidate is a respected war hero who treats women with respect, loves animals, doesn't smoke and occasionally has a beer.

Asking the class to choose from the three candidates, they all plump for the last one and are told they've just rejected Franklin Delanor Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in favour of Adolf Hitler.

The point Mikkelsen's Martin is making is people are never how you expect them to be.

However a recurring question in Vinterberg's film is also whether alcohol unlocks creativity or ultimately destroys it?

At the start of the film, Martin is washed up and in the throes of a mid-life crisis.

Weighed down by bourgeois respectability and family responsibilities, his marriage to Maria Bonnevie's Anika is going stale and he has lost his mojo as a teacher.

His lessons are so dull, students and parents at the Copenhagen gymnasium school where he teaches summon him to a meeting to tell him if he doesn't buck up they will not get the grades they need for university.

Martin has three friends in the school - Thomas Bo Larsen's PE teacher Tommy,  Lars Ranthe's music teacher Peter and Magnus Millang's Nikolaj.

During a lavish 40th birthday dinner for Nikolaj at a swanky restaurant, the four of them muse on how alcohol perks up their lives.

The group starts to discuss a theory from the Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skarderud that humans are born with an alcohol deficiency of 0.05%.

Soon they are embarking on an experiment to maintain the right alcohol level throughout the working day, drinking at breakfast and also in school but not in the evenings or weekends.

Martin, Nikolaj, Tommy and Peter all start to see dramatic improvements in their mood, their family relationships and their ability to motivate their students.

Impressed by the success of their experiment, they increase the alcohol intake to 0.10 blood alcohol concentration and are pleased with the results.

However their decision to escalate things further by binge drinking starts to have serious consequences on their ability to relate to others and their mood.

It also inevitably results in tragedy.

As an original member of the Danish Dogme filmmaking collective with Lars Von Trier, Vinterberg is no stranger to controversial subject matter.

His 1998 film 'Festen (Celebration)' tackled the trauma of sexual abuse at the hands of a family member by letting the consequences play out at a wedding.

'Jagten (The Hunt)' saw Mikkelsen play a kindergarten schoolteacher in a small town wrongfully accused of sexually abusing a child in his class.

Here he comes up with a playful tragicomedy which explores Danish attitudes to alcohol and, it has to be said, they don't seem all that different to their British and Irish counterparts.

Instead of taking the high ground, though, Vinterberg and his fellow screenwriter Tobias Lindholm adopt a similar approach to drink as Danny Boyle and his screenwriter John Hodge took to drugs in their adaptation of Irvine Welsh's 'Trainspotting'.

We see the initial buzz of alcohol and the pleasure it can beingy before witnessing the corrosive effect of increased doses on individual members of the group.

From its depiction of the "lake run" drinking game played by students at the college to a dance sequence at the end, no film has managed to be this high spirited in capturing the sensation of the effects of imbibing alcohol.

However when the boozing in Vinterberg's movie hits its lowest point, it delivers a painful and sadly inevitable punch in the gut.

With a script as strong as this, Vinterberg extracts great performances from his cast.

Millang and Ranthe make engaging company, while Bonnevie brings a performance of great heft as Martin's heaviest drinking unearths some harsh truths about their marriage.

Larsen also handles his character's narrative arc superbly.

However 'Another Round' belongs mostly to Mikkelsen who delivers another compelling performance - one that is neither preachy nor patronising but just revels in its capacity to surprise.

The director deftly marshalls the talent of Sturla Brandth Grovien's cinematography and Anne Osterud and Janus Billeskov Jansen's intelligent editing to recreate the sensation various amounts of booze has on the group during their experiment.

Ironic flashes of patriotism in the form of the use of Ole Hoyer's 'In Denmark, I Was Born' suggest Vinterberg and Lindholm are fascinated by a tendency in the national character to allow the bingeing of alcohol to turn a mild mannered people into a wild, boorish race.

However the ambiguity of their approach towards drinking and Vibterberg's subtle blending of style and narrative substance is also the work of a director at the top of his game 

Rather inevitably, Hollywood is weighing up plans for an English language remake with Leonardo DiCaprio stepping into Mikkelsen's shoes.

In order to justify that decision whoever takes up the directorial reins will have a huge task ahead trying to match or surpass the technical brilliance and guile of Vinterberg in the original.

As accomplished as he is, DiCaprio will also have to do a lot too to outgun Mikkelsen's fantastic work.

The stakes are high.

Unless the director and star of a US remake can bring something new to the party, why bother?

('Another Round' was released in UK and Irish cinemas on July 2, 2021)