IFFR 2025 review: Acts of Love (Jeppe Rønde)

“Uneven and tonally confused, Rønde’s film is entertaining enough to captivate the audience for its somewhat too long runtime.”

Memories can’t be trusted, says one of the characters in Jeppe Rønde’s Acts of Love. But in this tale, based partially on the experiences with a religious cult of the director’s sister, the memories of its protagonist are all too real. So real that repressing them has led her into faith and the desire to make a miracle come true. Uneven and tonally confused, Rønde’s film is entertaining enough to captivate the audience for its somewhat too long runtime, but ends in a baffling conclusion that might either make you a believer, or make you laugh out loud in incredulity.

Hanna (a mesmerizing Cecilie Lassen) harbors a secret so dark it made her seek refuge in an isolated Christian community on Denmark’s western coast. Hanna dearly wants to become a mother, a desire burning so hot that she lets the men of the community couple with her in loveless acts solely aimed at procreation. The varied group of people she has lived with for seven years now holds the middle ground between a commune (some might say cult) and a role-playing psychology experiment. Led by the charismatic Kirsten (Ann Eleonora Jørgensen), at once a church leader and a psychologist, the group engages in so-called ‘mirroring’ sessions, in which the group re-enacts scenes from the life of one in their midst to unlock that person’s deepest and darkest memories.

When a newly hired bricklayer who is to build an annex to the group’s farmhouse turns out to be Hanna’s younger brother Jakob (Jonas Holst Schmidt), Hanna panics and goes out of her way to avoid contact. A confrontation is inevitable though, and while Jakob blatantly ignores the rules of the group when he doesn’t want to play along with the imaginary world they have created, he gets the chance to redeem himself by prying loose the heavy stone on Hanna’s heart. An intense mirroring session reveals the true nature of the siblings’ relationship and proves to be a test of the community’s willingness to abide by their own rules.

The film opens with a roving camera moving through the interior of the commune’s large farmhouse, as ominous music conjures up the idea that we might be in for a supernatural thriller of sorts. And while through its religious themes and its miraculous ending Acts of Love certainly touches upon the supernatural, the film never really gets thrilling, for the most part abandoning the tone of its opening scenes. Occasionally it veers back into this mode, when it bathes scenes in blood-red light or brings back that ominous score, but Rønde just as easily falls into the mode of a well-acted family drama in which the community’s leader, Kirsten, suggests a sinister undertone that doesn’t really pay off.

When the incestuous relationship between Hanna and her brother is revealed, it is Kirsten who has a crisis of faith and struggles with the tenets she herself has imposed, tenets that the rest of her flock readily abandon in the face of the illicit affair. However, Hanna is accepted back into the fold when that affair bears fruit, a reversal of fortune that makes the actions of the supporting cast confusing and erratic. That Hanna and Jakob’s relationship bears fruit at all is a choice – after the story deliberately showed Hanna’s attempts with the male component of the community to be failures – all the more so because the film establishes a definitive reason for those failures. Negating this in the closing scene suggests a divine miracle, incongruous with the almost bemused depiction of the commune’s specific brand of Christian faith and the rituals that come with it.

Despite this lack of logic, Acts of Love still works on the level of the central relationship between brother and sister, played with a mixture of tenderness and fiery passion by Lassen and Holst Schmidt. The way they slowly transition from keeping each other at arm’s length, mostly from Hanna’s side, to passionate lovers is very subtly done in small increments, as Hanna gradually regains trust in her brother before allowing their relationship to turn into full-on love. The way Rønde frames and directs the actors in their scenes together, drawing the edges of the frame in closer over the course of the film, complements this trajectory of becoming the only two people in this world that matter to each other.

Acts of Love has a provocative theme, and it seems as though the director can’t quite find the right tone to ease its taboo ideas into the mind of the viewer. The tonal shifts are jarring, and the behavior of some of the characters seems detached from reality, even if one can argue that they are removed from reality within the universe of the film as well. Still, Acts of Love is compelling and there is definitely a good film in there somewhere, with the actors, in particular the two main ones, giving excellent performances that invite empathy despite their questionable actions. It’s just that Rønde hasn’t created the best and tightest version of this story, even if it is an intriguing work by someone who clearly doesn’t shy away from taking chances.