The experiment escalates. At first the four teachers stay at 0.05% and only drink during working hours, and their lessons and moods improve noticeably. Encouraged, they raise the dose to test higher levels, and eventually they try all-out intoxication. The results fall apart: public drunkenness and humiliation, and damage at home, especially to Martin's already fragile marriage.
They end the experiment, but Tommy, the lonely gym teacher, cannot stop. His dependency deepens, and he drunkenly sails his boat out into the ocean and never returns. The friends attend his funeral near the end of the film.
Afterwards, the remaining friends join the celebrating graduates at the harbour. Martin, who once danced but has long held himself back, finally lets go in an explosive dance to "What a Life," then leaps toward the water. The ending is deliberately unresolved. It honours the joy alcohol and friendship can release while Tommy's death stands as its price.
Seen again after the ending, the opening Kierkegaard quote reads as an elegy. Youth is a dream, and Martin's dance is his brief return to it, made more poignant by the knowledge that one friend did not come back and by the film's dedication to Ida Vinterberg.