The Oscar for Best International Feature Film (changed earlier this year from Best Foreign Language Film) seems like a done deal. Between Bong Joon-ho’s tense, brilliant class drama, Parasite–which may even win Best Picture–and Pedro Almodovar’s melancholy look back on his life and career, Pain and Glory, the other eventual nominees already feel like also-rans. However, even those also-rans can be great. Last year’s Never Look Away is one of my favorite film’s in recent memory and Denmark’s submission this year, Queen of Hearts, may join its ranks.
The film follows Anne (Trine Dyrholm), a lawyer who focuses on helping young or adolescent clients and who, with her beautiful house, playful twin girls and loving husband, seems to have it all. That perfect life becomes complicated, though, when her husband Peter’s (Magnus Krepper) estranged son, Gustav (Gustav Lindh), comes to live with them. Though Gustav is standoffish at first, he soon becomes more active and reliable in the home than Peter and an undeniable attraction grows between him and Anne.
Given that Gustav is a minor (something that perhaps isn’t made quite clear enough early on), you’d assume that we’re supposed to see Anne as a monster, but what makes Queen of Hearts so fascinating is that director May el-Toukhy doesn’t make things so clear-cut. For one, Dyrholm is commanding in her role. Anne is clearly confident and intelligent, and we see her deploy her gift for argument–and more importantly, manipulation–both in her professional and personal life.
One of the first things we see her do is have an argument with Peter in which he laments, with the frustration of someone who’s been in this position before, that there’s just no winning with Anne. Indeed, the more we see of her, from the way she convinces a young assault victim to testify in court to the way she initially tricks Gustav into becoming more involved in the family by promising not to tell Peter of wrongdoing, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Anne doesn’t get what she wants. Indeed, morally reprehensible as Anne’s behavior is, there is something compelling, if not necessarily admirable, in how fully realized Anne is: there’s an undeniable thrill in watching a woman of a certain age with so much agency.
Given that, when one scene finds Anne standing in Gustav’s room one night and he walks in wearing just a towel, the way that she seems not just unfazed by his nakedness, but brazenly determined to show how comfortable she is with it, her sexual interest in him seems inevitable. There and throughout, Dyrholm’s performance is only enhanced by Lindh, with whom she shares a crackling chemistry. When Gustav and Anne take the twins to swim in a river, the way Gustav asks her to join them in the water feels like an invitation to something else and the way they splash each other once she does–completely oblivious to the girls watching them–feels like foreplay. The buildup is incredible and when it does eventually turn into action, the result is both shocking in its carnality and dangerous in the way it threatens to destroy the life Anne has so painstakingly built.
Still, as much chemistry as the characters have, el-Toukhy and co-writer Maren Louise Käehne are careful never to fully justify or condemn Anne’s actions. Just when the film seems to get as caught up in that chemistry as its characters, it reminds both them and the viewers of how wrong it is to act on it by having another character catch them in an embrace. When a choice Anne makes to keep the affair from blowing up her marriage makes her seem like an unforgivable sociopath, one of the children she helped out of an abusive home surprises her with flowers.
While some could view Queen of Hearts‘ refusal to condemn or defend Anne outright as a weakness, the way it explores her moral relativism without passing judgement is actually what makes the film so hard to shake. Anne isn’t a ghoul or a lovable anti-hero, she’s a flawed character whose believability as a real person makes her upsetting to root for. Perhaps that isn’t enough to win the film an Oscar, but it’s at least worth a nomination.
