Loving Adults Review: Netflix Danish Movie Unravels Quickly, Resulting Superficial But Also Fascinating

Starring: Dar Salim, Sonja Richter, Sus Wilkins

Director: Barbara Topsøe-Rothenborg

Streaming Platform: Netflix

Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

Loving Adults (Kærlighed for voksne) is a Danish crime thriller based on Anna Ekberg’s novel of the same name. Directed by Barbara Topsøe-Rothenborg, it was written by Anders Rønnow Klarklund and Jacob Weinreich. It is available on Netflix from August 26, 2022. As expected, it finished in Netflix’s Top Ten straight away in third place. We are not sure if it deserves it, even if it has a couple of interesting ideas in the nutshell. But let’s get to us. They seem to be the perfect portrait of the Scandinavian bourgeois family: he is a visionary and an established ecological architect, and she is a former violinist with a passion for jogging, forced to stay at home to devote herself to her only son close to graduation, miraculously cured of a serious illness that seemed incurable.

Impeccable and entrenched in a very elegant villa surrounded by greenery, that apparent perfection nevertheless begins to creak when the wife begins to suspect her husband’s unfaithfulness, having seen those strange messages sent to his cell phone in the middle of the night. It is when Leonora catches him red-handed with the beautiful and young colleague that Christian, determined to leave her, finds himself faced with a hitherto unpublished aspect of his wife: as a young man perhaps, driven by obsession and jealousy, she was able to kill – so much so that it could do it again, certainly moved by the same reasons.

Loving Adults Review: Story Plot

Leonora and Christian have been married for some time now. Theirs seems like a perfect life, now that the health problems of their only child seem to have been completely overcome. Christian has a construction company in partnership with his great friend Peter, Leonora has abandoned a promising career as a violinist to assist her frail son. They have a nice home, they love each other. Or, at least, so it seems on the surface. It is enough to dig a little to bring out dark pasts, betrayals, and bad intentions. After all, as the police detective tells us at the film’s opening, the most heinous crimes are committed for love.

Narrated by the former policeman who investigated the case, in a flashback that falls back in the weeks before a murder that will become double in a short time, Loving Adults takes the pages of the book of the same name from which it is taken, written by Anna Ekberg, to create a thriller/crime that tries to scrutinize the dysfunctional relationships of a broken marriage, unable to show the world and itself its frailties. If the lack of fidelity seems to be the dominant theme and the pivot around which the entire unfolding of events revolves, it is rather the protection of one’s moral and social image at any price, and therefore the concealment of one’s unspeakable roughness, to emerge as a possible less banal reflection of marital misdeeds.

Loving Adults Review and Analysis

Quite quickly and suddenly, and as has been widely anticipated (but it is an ambiguous narrative that lurks us), the protagonists of this film go from being perfect, happy, and fulfilled husband and wives, to show themselves what they are. Christian is an inept, man-puppet who lets himself be carried away by events. It always seems that someone decides for him, and his past (and present, and probably future) mistakes are far from being forgotten, or not having disastrous consequences for him. Leonora is a calculating machine. She is cold to the point of improbability, bad to the edge of delirium. A true sociopath of steel.

Depending on who of the two feels the need to protect themselves from the other and consequently from which of the two spouses appears on several occasions the victim and the executioner, Loving Adults points to (easy) turn and the deceptions of perception between what is believed to be true and what is instead pure illusion to carry on a thriller Gone Girl that rarely manages to affect completely, solved with bland simplicity on some key points that would have needed more refinement and amazement, for this reason, destined for a not very memorable and sufficiently engaging vision.

Loving Adults Review: The Last Words

Husband and wife, unknown until it is no longer possible to be completely unknown, the protagonists of Loving Adults, played by their respective actors Dar Salim and Sonja Richter, crumble the false hope of a love idyll with incalculable results, showing the less flattering side and more cruel, less edifying and more imponderable than love (sick): a feeling coveted, conquered, carried on with difficulty, then vanished in the search for control of the other. A sad common parable of many relationships on the verge of failure, dangerously drawn into a spiral of violence.