{"id":36479,"date":"2026-08-10T13:15:44","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T08:15:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/?p=36479"},"modified":"2026-08-10T13:15:44","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T08:15:44","slug":"an-unusual-open-minded-marital-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/?p=36479","title":{"rendered":"An Unusual, Open-Minded Marital Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><script>\r\n  atOptions = {\r\n    'key' : '644b717812d811d6a1c1fc5b6ccd6fa6',\r\n    'format' : 'iframe',\r\n    'height' : 90,\r\n    'width' : 728,\r\n    'params' : {}\r\n  };\r\n<\/script>\r\n<script src=\"https:\/\/www.highperformanceformat.com\/644b717812d811d6a1c1fc5b6ccd6fa6\/invoke.js\"><\/script>\r\n<br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\t\u201cI would never fall in love if I was in a good relationship.\u201d So says one participant in the women\u2019s church group where Copenhagen-based wife and mother Kate (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen) confesses that she\u2019s been having a three-year affair with another man, and doesn\u2019t much regret it. It\u2019s a line that sounds like sturdy, suitably Christian advice, but is it true? Kate\u2019s husband Orla (Simon Sears) is attentive, attractive and empathetic; so is Andreas (<a href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/anders-danielsen-lie\/\" id=\"auto-tag_anders-danielsen-lie\" data-tag=\"anders-danielsen-lie\">Anders Danielsen Lie<\/a>), the smart, offbeat archaeologist she\u2019s smitten with at first sight. Alternately droll and emotionally acute, Maria B\u00e4ck\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/t\/brave-new-love\/\" id=\"auto-tag_brave-new-love\" data-tag=\"brave-new-love\">Brave New Love<\/a>\u201d never presents this romantic triangle as a problem with one solution; it\u2019s considerably less judgmental than the church ladies as it gives its protagonist space to figure out if she really loves two people at once, or just loves nobody \u2014 herself included \u2014 quite enough.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\tPremiering in the main competition at Locarno, this is an emotionally intelligent, gently wry character drama of a distinctly Scandi stripe, occupying a comparable arthouse lane to Dag Johan Haugerud\u2019s Oslo Trilogy and recent works by Joachim Trier, albeit with a distinctly feminine point of view behind the camera. It\u2019s not just Danielsen Lie\u2019s reliably interesting presence that brings to mind \u201cThe Worst Person in the World\u201d at points, as B\u00e4ck\u2019s script (on which Trier collaborator Eskil Vogt was a consultant) ponders similar feelings of middle-class millennial female unrest in a character who simply opted for marriage and family earlier in life. Relatable and discussable, B\u00e4ck\u2019s second narrative feature likely reps an easier sell to international distributors than her first, the darkly heightened psychodrama \u201cPsychosis in Stockholm.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\tIt\u2019s on a camping trip with her family that Kate first locks eyes with Andreas \u2014 they\u2019re both stark naked, having just swum in the same forest lake, but that\u2019s rendered almost incidental by the telling intensity of their shared gaze. When he walks off, Kate scribbles down her number and leaves it under his towel. But then \u201cBrave New Love\u201d takes the first of several swerves: Instead of charting its protagonist\u2019s first steps into infidelity, it skips breezily through snapshots from the ensuing years-long affair. Andreas becomes almost as entrenched a partner in her life as her husband, though she manages to keep the relationships strictly separate \u2014 a rationalized arrangement in her mind, though that collapses when Andreas calmly announces that he\u2019s moving to Greece for a job.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\tIt\u2019s only with the affair on ice that disorder creeps into Kate\u2019s life, while Orla and their teenage daughter Athena (an excellent Noemi Carbone Mannov) begin to sense something amiss. Editor Julius Krebs Damsbo artfully toggles between present and past, gradually filling in the sensual specifics of the affair \u2014 which aren\u2019t entirely as you\u2019d expect \u2014 while tracking Kate\u2019s spiraling sense of mourning for whatever it was they had. Without it, her comfortable marriage to Orla seems that much more confined, the increasingly separate islands they seem to be on underlined by DP Maria Von Hausswolff in one tense bedtime argument scene, with the couple\u2019s faces visible only in their respective bathroom-vanity mirrors. Kate seeks solidarity in the aforementioned church group, despite not being much of a believer herself; she doesn\u2019t quite find it, but the candor enabled by all-female company is its own kind of liberation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-margin-lr-auto  lrv-a-font-body-m   \">\n\tThorborg Johansen\u2019s subtly nervy performance articulates Kate\u2019s antsy anxieties and erratic moods without making her too much of a scatty romantic heroine. She\u2019s believable while not straining too hard for our sympathy, which winds up fairly evenly divided between all the principals anyway \u2014 with a slight advantage to Sears\u2019 beautifully modulated turn as Orla, battling his own emotional and bodily securities while trying to hold down the fort. Handed the most script\u2019s least knowable character, Andersen Lie nonetheless sharply gestures to a life outside his relations with Kate, something she herself hasn\u2019t much considered. In its efforts to be fair to all these characters \u2014 via a key, spirit-lightening change of scene \u2014 \u201cBrave New Love\u2019s\u201d final act winds up a little fuzzy, though that\u2019s a preferable flaw to tunnel vision: B\u00e4ck\u2019s film prefers untidy personal drama to a tidy moral verdict. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<script async=\"async\" data-cfasync=\"false\" src=\"https:\/\/pl30214220.effectivecpmnetwork.com\/9ab3d4df8a7e1a6171e16ddbf732cc19\/invoke.js\"><\/script>\r\n<div id=\"container-9ab3d4df8a7e1a6171e16ddbf732cc19\"><\/div>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cI would never fall in love if I was in a good relationship.\u201d So says one participant in the women\u2019s church group where Copenhagen-based wife and mother Kate (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen) confesses that she\u2019s been having a three-year affair with another man, and doesn\u2019t much regret it. It\u2019s a line that sounds like sturdy, suitably&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36480,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/brave-new.webp?w=676&h=380&crop=1","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pics-news"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/36480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usnews-14267fa.ingress-comporellon.ewp.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}