117 min | NR | December 4, 2020 | Samuel Goldwyn Films
Four burned-out Danish teachers test a theory that humans are born with a blood alcohol level half a percent too low. They decide to fix the deficit at work, during the school day, in the name of science. The experiment goes exactly as well as you would expect.
Martin teaches history to bored teenagers and goes home to a marriage that has gone silent. He and three colleagues drink too much at a birthday dinner and seize on a half-serious thesis about maintaining a constant low-grade buzz. They start measuring their blood alcohol and topping it up before class. Thomas Vinterberg’s film looks like a comedy about functional drinking and turns into something colder. It is about middle-aged men who have stopped feeling anything and mistake intoxication for the return of their own aliveness.
Mads Mikkelsen plays Martin as a man hollowed out from the inside. He moves through the early scenes with the careful stillness of someone afraid that any sudden motion will reveal how little is left. When the alcohol works, Mikkelsen lets a younger man surface in the eyes and the shoulders, and the change is precise enough to feel like a verdict on the sober man. Thomas Bo Larsen plays Tommy, the gym teacher whose loneliness has no off switch, with a heaviness that the project only makes worse. Magnus Millang and Lars Ranthe fill out the group as Nikolaj and Peter, two men who treat the experiment as data right up until it stops being data.
Vinterberg and co-writer Tobias Lindholm build the structure around rising blood alcohol percentages, and the editing tracks the men’s decline against on-screen numbers that promise control the film never delivers. The handheld camera stays close and slightly unsteady, which reads as warmth in the drunk scenes and as nausea in the sober ones. Vinterberg never stages a drinking sequence as pure celebration or pure warning. The film holds both readings at once and forces the audience to decide. The final sequence drops the academic framing entirely and lets the body speak through Mikkelsen’s movement.
This is a film about the gap between feeling alive and being alive, and how easily a man will trade the second for the first. Vinterberg refuses to deliver either an addiction cautionary tale or a defense of drinking. He puts four men in front of the question and watches them answer it differently. The experiment proves nothing about alcohol and everything about the men who needed it. That clarity, held without judgment, is what makes the ending land like a body falling and rising at the same time.