Bäck's 'Brave New Love' Premieres at Locarno
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- Brave New Love premiered in the main competition at the Locarno Film Festival, with Maria Bäck directing from her own script that enlisted Eskil Vogt (a longtime Joachim Trier collaborator) as a consultant.
- The film stars Kathrine Thorborg Johansen as Kate, a Copenhagen wife and mother in a three-year affair with archaeologist Andreas (Anders Danielsen Lie), while her attentive husband Orla (Simon Sears) and teenage daughter Athena (Noemi Carbone Mannov) begin sensing something amiss only after Andreas announces he's moving to Greece.
- Rather than tracing infidelity step by step, Bäck's script skips through snapshots of the years-long affair, then tracks Kate's unraveling once it ends — including a tense bedtime argument with Orla shot through separate bathroom-vanity mirrors.
- The review places the film in a Scandinavian arthouse lineage alongside Dag Johan Haugerud's Oslo Trilogy and Trier's work, explicitly comparing Kate's 'middle-class millennial female unrest' to Renate Reinsve's character in 'The Worst Person in the World.'
- Bäck's second narrative feature is flagged as a likely easier international sell than her darkly heightened debut 'Psychosis in Stockholm,' with Variety calling it 'relatable and discussable.'
- Thorborg Johansen's performance is praised as 'subtly nervy,' and Sears' Orla is singled out as the film's most quietly devastating turn, fighting to 'hold down the fort' while battling his own insecurities.
- The review notes the final act gets 'a little fuzzy' in its effort to be fair to all three principals — but frames that as a preferable flaw to 'tunnel vision,' since the film prefers 'untidy personal drama to a tidy moral verdict.'
Why it matters: Bäck's selection for Locarno's main competition — and Variety's explicit comparison to 'The Worst Person in the World' — positions 'Brave New Love' as a serious arthouse contender for international distribution deals, marking a step up from her 2020 debut 'Psychosis in Stockholm' that the review deems less exportable.
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