Following on from his plodding adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Vinterberg returns to Danish cinema with this autobiographically inspired drama about growing up in a terribly, awfully middle-class commune during the 1970s. When stuck-up architect Erik (Ulrich Thomsen) inherits a vast property, his news-reading wife Anna (Trine Dyrholm) knows just what to do: invite a bunch of strangers and acquaintances in to form a commune.

You don't have to have seen Lukas Moodysson's similarly themed and vastly superior Together (2000) to know that this domestic arrangement is going to implode. And sure enough, once Erik, a man we are told can faint with anger, is no longer the centre of attention at home, he seeks assurances elsewhere, and then seeks to move these assurances – in the form of a blonde 24-year-old student – into the collective.

Anna descends into Bergman-esque distress, her daughter Freja becomes increasingly concerned, and the others, well, they . . . are the others. One of the many problems with The Commune is that it never really feels like a commune. Its inhabitants are either undifferentiated, or one-trick creations: there’s the little boy with a heart condition and his ill-defined parents; there’s a man who cries a lot; there’s a red-haired woman who, we’re told, has a lot of sexual partners. We have to be told, as these people are barely introduced, let alone explored.

Potential subplots, accordingly, fall by the wayside. When Anna first suggests the living arrangement, she dreamily declares that she has “always wanted to live” to leafleteer Ole: we never do find out why.

Anna’s eventual breakdown, despite a most affecting turn from Dyrholm, feels like it belongs in a different movie. Its repercussions in the household are about as profound as arguments about washing-up. The soundtrack works hard to get in emotional punches when the screenplay fails: cue Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. But if the characters on screen aren’t too bothered, then what hope for the viewer?