Another Round is ostensibly an ode to the joys and perils of drinking to excess, but it’s actually a cri de coeur to be jolted out of one’s status quo stupor, no matter the stimulant. “I hope this film is in contact with a deeper conversation than just how much or how to drink,” Vinterberg says via videoconference from his home in Copenhagen. “It’s a battle against being measured, being valued, being graded, being evaluated, and living a very controlled life. Human life has become very much about achieving results and being measured in the right way: There’s grades at school or the number of clicks that you will or won’t get on your article. But there’s also the evaluations you get from your friends and colleagues on social media many times a day.”
He has seen the effects of all of this on his own teenage daughters, who he called “very fearful.” “If you look at the surveys of Danish youth culture, they feel historically bad about themselves.” A World Health Organization report in 2020 found that Danish 15-year-olds consumed alcohol at almost double the European average. “They feel ugly, they feel unable to perform. That, I think, has to do with living in a society where you have to perform.”
He says Another Round is a reaction against these things; “a riot for the uncontrollable.” (Spirit, as in alcohol, is embedded in the word inspiration, he points out.) “Alcohol becomes an entrance gate to the uncontrolled for a lot of people,” he says. “You end up beyond your own control, and there’s apparently a need for that.” After all, Vinterberg asks, how many married couples do you know who met each other sober? “I don’t know any.”
The director conceived of the film with Mikkelsen—whom he’d directed in the 2012 drama The Hunt—and the three other main actors, Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang, and Lars Ranthe. “Mads is so super incredibly good and precise and refined down to the smallest detail,” Vinterberg effuses. “I asked him to do things, and he‘s actually doing them but even better than I ever imagined.”
They also just get each other, Vinterberg says, being around the same age and from the same place. “We grew out of the same soil and watch the same movies, share the same language, and live almost next to each other, so there’s a mutual understanding, which I think can bring us pretty far. When you feel safe as an artist, you can let go and do more. And I challenged Mads a lot in this movie—to be tender and moving, to be funny and aggressive and tragic, and to be drunk and dance. I put a lot of things on his plate because I know he‘s really good and can do it.”