If The Hunt provided the first steps for Vinterberg’s Danish work to cross over into mainstream cinema, Another Round, the film he and Mikkelsen reunited on eight years later, has made that transition complete (cemented by Vinterberg’s recent surprise Best Director Oscar nomination, the first ever conferred on a Danish filmmaker). It’s positioned as a comedy about friendship and alcohol, but it’s more accurately a melancholy study of male midlife crisis. In The Hunt, friendly boozing as male bonding also factors in—early on before the shocking accusation divides the men who enjoy beers together, and later as something of a peace offering between best friends—but the four drinking buddies in Another Round, high-school teachers mired in their routines, frozen in life, aim to stick together. They come up with a scheme to beneficially regulate the pick-me-up of the alcohol buzz, like a form of controlled alcoholism, under the pretense that the human body naturally has a blood alcohol content deficiency (based on a theory by Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud), and decide, as an academic study, to raise those levels—and maintain them all day long. The experiment quickly alters Mikkelsen’s character, Martin, a history teacher, husband, and, father of two teenagers. To his unknowing students, he becomes surprisingly loose and animated, and he tries to reconnect emotionally with his wife, but we know that underneath it all, the sad emptiness still remains. Even as he’s stuck in an unending alcohol high, harsh reality will poke its way through.

So while at first Another Round feels like a jolly, ringing endorsement for champagne, fancy cocktails, and the freeing values of alcohol indulgence in general (its title in Danish is simply Druk, slang for binge-drinking), in the end, these men, as they exhibit increasingly sloppy behavior, are still chasing that high—one that, because of life’s inescapable ups and downs, may never be attained. The film concludes with its much-discussed showy dance scene where Mikkelsen, a trained gymnast and ballet dancer, lets it all out—years of repression spilling onto the pavement along the water’s edge to the song “What a Life” for all onlookers to see. It’s undeniably wonderful, but many of the film’s quieter moments of truth are equally resonant. There’s so much feeling apparent in the close-ups of Mikkelsen’s fascinatingly chiseled face, so many unspoken thoughts and words, presumably involving discontent and regret.

Eight years might not seem like a huge interval between collaborations, but these are crucial times, as the director and actor, only four years apart in age, venture from the relative ease of the forties into the dangerous unknown of the fifties: certifiable middle age. You can almost sense in Another Round Vinterberg and Mikkelsen entering the next chapter, both having lived, lost, and matured during those years, along with the struggling men portrayed on screen.

And with just these two pairings, in no way does it feel premature to place Vinterberg and Mikkelsen in the pantheon of great director/actor partnerships. Theirs will hopefully extend beyond other promising two-film collaborations, like the mid-’80s output of Peter Weir and Harrison Ford—a textbook example of transcendent director-actor dynamics, in which a working relationship provides the forum to expose some of both parties’ finest, deepest talents, leaving audiences exuberantly awaiting more. •

Laura Kern is the editor at Metrograph. Among other publications, her writing has appeared in Film Comment, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone.