Rotterdam 2025 Review: ACTS OF LOVE Attempts to Unearth the Repressed Past

Jeppe Rønde’s Acts of Love follows Hanna (Cecilie Lassen), who lives in a New Age Christian community in rural Denmark and yearns for motherhood. The community is led by charismatic Kirsten (Ann Eleonora Jørgensen), who serves as both a quasi-religious leader and a psychologist.

The arrival of Jakob (Jonas Holst Schmidt), an outsider hired as a bricklayer, disrupts the group’s cloistered dynamic. For Hanna, Jakob’s presence stirs unresolved tensions, as he is linked to a life she has deliberately left behind.

The film delves into themes of personal and collective memory, the interplay of love and transgression, and the tension between community and individual identity. Rønde’s storytelling, which has been defined by an anthropological focus on rituals and belief systems, weaves elements of myth, and psychological realism. His earlier documentaries explored faith and cultural rituals, while his transition to fiction with Bridgend retained this analytical lens, examining an epidemic of teenage suicides in Wales through atmosphere rather than causality.

Rønde employs a similar aesthetic: observational intimacy combined with immersive camerawork in Acts of Love. This approach blurs the line between lived experience and dramatization, most notably in the film’s two intertwined narrative strands, the unfolding drama between Hanna and Jakob and the community’s therapeutic sessions, which aim to unearth repressed memories through role-play techniques known as "mirroring." These sessions, orchestrated by Kirsten, push ethical boundaries, creating a charged and often unsettling atmosphere.

The concept of memory, particularly its subjectivity, serves as a central motif. The film opens with the phrase "Based on real memories," subverting the familiar "Based on a true story" tagline and challenging the audience to question the reliability of personal histories. Memory is portrayed not as static truth but as a construct shaped by perception, repression, societal norms and codes.

As the story progresses, it is revealed that Hanna and Jakob are siblings, bound by a shared family trauma involving their father, an alcoholic who hosted chaotic parties in their home. Kirsten, believing that unresolved trauma underpins Hanna’s infertility, uses the therapeutic sessions as a method of confrontation and potential healing. These sessions are staged as immersive theatrical recreations from the siblings’ past, performed in front of the entire community. The process, however, becomes invasive and voyeuristic. 

The film shifts its focus to the siblings’ relationship, using the mystery of their shared trauma as a plot device. This dynamic reveals a connection marked by taboo and transgression, with their bond shaped by an uneasy push-and-pull tension. While the therapeutic process aims for catharsis, it instead evokes discomfort.

Rønde structures Acts of Love around two narrative modes: the sibling drama and the psychotherapy sessions, which function as a form of meta-narration. However, the film’s runtime, exceeding two hours, suffers from pacing issues.

The cyclical nature of the sessions, Hanna and Jakob´s fights, the delayed revelation of the siblings’ backstory create promise that will go unfulfilled. The prolonged buildup, while thematically intentional, occasionally feels repetitive, diminishing the story’s impact.

Working with cinematographer Jakob Møller, Rønde employs long, unbroken takes to capture the therapeutic sessions, opting for a raw, unembellished visual style. While this approach reinforces the film’s observational quality, the extended takes contribute to the film’s sluggish pacing. The storytelling often meanders and returns to the same dilemmas the siblings dealt with. Although the film initially appears to be a drama about cults, it transitions into a family drama with incestual relationship and its psychological ramifications of past traumas. 

Tomasz Wasilewski’s Fools also dealt with an incestuous relationship. Wasilewski’s minimalist approach offers a tightly paced and surreal exploration of a mother-son relationship, whereas Rønde appears more invested in the experimental nature of his therapeutic framework than in traditional storytelling coherence. This focus results in a free-flowing structure that feels repetitive.

Neither cult, not incest drama, Rønde seems more preoccupied with individuals wanting to live a life to their best abilities and against the odds. Ultimately, Acts of Love is more about trauma, past and processing the pain, while respecting others´s choices. However, the director´s approach that appears to be based more on improvisation rather than structured narrative proves a challenge despite the uplifting message.

The film screened in the Harbour section of the 2025 International Film Festival of Rotterdam. Visit the film's page at the festival's official site for more information.