Queen of Hearts is a 2019 Danish drama about a woman who jeopardizes both her career and her family when she makes a troubling sexual decision.
In the pastoral landscapes of Denmark, Anne (Trine Dyrholm) and Peter (Magnus Krepper) live a comfortable life with their young twin daughters (Liv and Silja Esmår Dannemann), Anne a successful, high pressure lawyer with a firm grip on the household. She is controlling and in control, her husband and children subservient to her powerful presence; a house in order is a home worth keeping. However there is a distance in the air, and when Peter’s son Gustav (Gustav Lindh) from another marriage arrives from Sweden to live with them, tensions run high as the boy and his father don’t see eye-to-eye. Worse, after Anne catches Gustav stealing, she strikes an unusual deal with the teenager though this is only invitation to a curiosity that triggers an illicit, even dangerous sexual encounter. But at what cost?
Director and co-writer May el-Toukhy‘s hypnotic Queen of Hearts (Dronningen – original title) is a powerfully provocative work of human damage, a simmering, achingly emotional experience with a lead performance from Dyrholm that is nothing short of astonishing. Devoid of the trappings of a Hollywood older femme fatale-like melodrama, with see-through plotting and a meaningless attachment to physical sex, Queen of Hearts instead puts its weight on the pieces in play, building a gripping sense of authenticity to a series of disturbing choices.
Anne works as a defense attorney, the secondary story about her efforts to defend victims of domestic abuse, her careful but sometimes unorthodox methods revealing a woman of great passion left deeply unsatisfied both in the court and at home. When she overhears Gustav having sex with a girl his age in his room, it sparks a desire within her, something she has difficulty shedding, unseen by Peter as she longs for witness to her emptiness. How this is presented to us is heartbreaking not so much because maybe some might identify with Anne’s feelings, but because Dyrholm so effortlessly wears this pain about her with a rare kind of fearlessness. A terrific moment with Soft Cell‘s Tainted Love is one full of subtlety and eroticism that drives one but is lost on all others.
Queen of Hearts is unapologetic or judgmental of Anne, a woman nearing her fifties with two children who is just that, she stripping nude to reveal a body weathered by time, stretch marks and loose skin holding her together. Yet the filmmakers don’t present this as a fault, Anne feeling empowered by her sexuality, eventually coming into Gustav’s room one late night – after several moments prior where a silent understanding was made – and seduces him. It’s a wordless, compulsive sex scene that fulfills a claustrophobic desire yet sets in motion a devastating spiral of lies, betrayal, and savagery that changes everything.
Anne is not the hero of this story for there is none in a game played this way. It’s a bold move and what’s most affecting is how well the filmmakers and Dyrholm take to playing it out as it rightfully should, the script never once cheating us for the sake of an ending we most expect. What we get then is a tragic, almost crippling demonstration of what it means to be alive, the price we all pay in the passing of our youth and the mounting frustration that we are indeed finite, how the older we become the less we might feel significant. Anne’s battle of such is at the heart of her choices and the consequences of doing so leave those in her wake thoroughly wrecked and a film with a final shot that refuses to draw curtains on a story that lasts well beyond our time with it. This is a deeply challenging piece of cinema with an extraordinary performance at its center making this one not to be missed. Highly recommended.