“The most significant flaw is also the simplest: we never truly get to know these characters.”

It’s often been said that the only thing harder than falling in love is maintaining a relationship, since it can be a challenge to keep a spark alive once it begins to fade. This is something that Maria Bäck uses as the starting point for Brave New Love, her third feature film, in which she once again sets out to explore different aspects of the human condition. In this case, her target is the theme of modern romance, and how it has taken on a drastically different form as society has grown more accustomed to unconventional relationship dynamics. The film centres around Kate, a mild-mannered therapist who has a comfortable but unexciting life, married to the likeable but slightly dull Orla. Together they are raising their daughter Athena, who is beginning to show early signs of the rebellion many teenagers embrace. When Kate comes across Andreas, an enigmatic and vaguely exotic stranger whom she initially meets in a forest while on a family excursion, she begins to see that there is more to life than just her humdrum existence. Her new friend (and soon-to-be romantic conquest) ignites something special in a woman who had earnestly thought her days of falling in love were behind her. An interesting premise which is impacted by direction that doesn’t quite allow it to meet its potential, Brave New Love is a middling effort that strives for originality, but sadly falls short in a few key areas, undermining the delivery of a potentially fascinating concept.

Infidelity is a subject that many in the creative field have set out to explore, looking at it from several different angles. For most, the idea of seeking love elsewhere while maintaining your relationship with an oblivious partner is evidence of the ongoing decline of social morals, especially as it becomes more normalised. Obviously this is the puritanical view, and one that seems to be the focus of Brave New Love, which assesses both sides of the subject. The protagonist is caught at a crossroads, forced to choose between staying in a marriage that is neither unpleasant nor difficult, but profoundly uninteresting, or seeking out the excitement that comes with meeting a man who unlocks something entirely new within her. The psychological push-and-pull endured by Kate is contrasted with the experiences of her husband and daughter, who have their own existential quandaries that they are trying to work through, albeit with just as little success. The result is a film that attempts to be a minimalistic (some may even suggest vaguely nihilistic) view of the unspoken rules of love, and how the simplest aspects of romance are sometimes the most difficult to understand. The core focus is on characters – the protagonist in particular – who are attempting to reconcile their own impulses and desires, which border on the libertine at times (mirrored in the film’s free-form approach to sexuality and nudity, which is tasteful but still quite provocative), and their steadfast belief in following the status quo, which only complicates their ever-compounding insecurities.

It is clear that Bäck has a serious interest in exploring this subject, but we soon find that the intention doesn’t quite match the execution, which is where shortcomings begin to emerge. Despite a strong thematic foundation, Brave New Love is very inconsistent in its tone and approach to the practical aspects of the story. Ultimately, the most significant flaw is also the simplest: we never truly get to know these characters. While the cast’s performances are solid, ambiguous character development and a scattered structure prevent us from forging a meaningful connection with them, especially since the film leaps between perspectives too rapidly for us to understand the purpose of certain moments. The downside of a very ambitious film about love and desire is that there are eventually too many moving parts in this story, most of which don’t receive the appropriate closure due to several narrative strands going unresolved. Since it is designed as a character study, it is peculiar how the film tends to struggle in properly exploring the inner lives of its protagonists. To their credit, the actors work with the material as best they can, but because of how the story is structured only Kathrine Thorborg Johansen is able to deliver a performance that feels complete, with the rest of the cast (which includes exceptional actors like Anders Danielsen Lie and Simon Sears, and the very promising newcomer Noemi Carbone Mannov) feeling like an afterthought. The lack of meaningful access into the minds of these characters, coupled with tonal irregularities that situate the film somewhere between a sardonic comedy and a heavy-handed psychological drama, make Brave New Love slightly too unwieldy to be entirely embraced, in spite of its promising ideas.  

By the end of this film, we aren’t entirely sure whether Brave New Love is supposed to be impenetrable by design, which would be an effective conundrum if we actually understood what the film was trying to communicate. There is some potential here – a solid central performance, as well as striking cinematography, provide value to the film – but it all ultimately feels overwhelmed by the tonal and narrative inconsistencies that begin to weigh the story down as it progresses and as we realise it is not going to become any more comprehensible. For a film about love, it is strangely cold – perhaps this was intentional, with the director aiming to tell a story about romance in which there is a continuous sense of detachment and distance, contrary to the usual manner in which these stories are told. However, when we are constantly trying to interpret the underlying message to the point where it becomes distracting, clearly something has gone amiss. Brave New Love is certainly trying to be profound, but while some of its observations are intriguing, it never quite manages to stick the landing, bogged down by constant ambiguities and lacking the foresight to follow through on some of the ideas that it introduces. This attempt to be a bold examination of modern romance is admirable for the effort, but loses so much of its promise through a meandering narrative that bounces between perspectives, and an inconsistent tone that takes an otherwise promising film and strips away its more interesting components, resulting in a truly middling affair – no pun intended.