A phone smashed against a wall is where this marriage stops pretending. Barbara Topsøe-Rothenborg’s Loving Adults has no patience for polite unhappiness. Christian and Leonora are at war before we have properly met them, and the film spends its running time finding out how much worse that war can get. The synopsis talks about the thin line between love and hate turning deadly. For once the blurb does not oversell.

The setup is plain. A wife discovers her husband’s affair with Xenia, and both of them take extreme measures to get what they want. Plenty of thrillers begin with a betrayal like this. What sets this one apart is that the wronged spouse turns out to be every bit as dangerous as the cheat. It starts small: a text at four in the morning that claims to come from Christian’s friend Peter, Leonora demanding to see it, Christian hurling the phone at the wall instead of handing it over. Then comes the office party, where Leonora walks in on him with Xenia, and Xenia looks her straight in the eye while it happens. The beat is cruel and almost theatrical, and it tells us Xenia is no passive bystander. After that, neither side holds the moral high ground for long. Leonora has a weapon, because Christian has been taking money from his company to pay for their son’s medical treatment, and she is ready to report him. Christian goes looking for leverage of his own. He finds it in her school years, in a boyfriend who fell off a cliff.

Dar Salim plays Christian as a man whose decisions feel clever for about ten seconds. He is good at panic dressed up as confidence. You watch him calculate, and you watch the calculation fail. Sonja Richter has the harder job and the better part. Her Leonora is controlled and watchful, and she unsettles precisely because she so rarely raises her voice. This is a woman who gave up her career as a violinist to look after a sick child, and Richter lets that sacrifice sit in her posture without ever turning it into a speech. When the film reveals that her past contains a death, she does not play it as a twist. She lets it settle over everything Leonora has said before, and earlier scenes start to look different. Sus Wilkins has less to work with as Xenia, who is more a force in the plot than a person, though she is never mere decoration. Lars Ranthe as Kim, Morten Burian as Peter and Iris Mealor Olsen as Martha are on screen briefly and do what the story asks of them.

Topsøe-Rothenborg directs with restraint. She does not chase atmosphere for its own sake, and the film is better for it. The tension comes from what two people know about each other and what they refuse to say. The price is a plain surface. There is no signature image here, and anyone hoping for one will leave without it. What the film offers instead is momentum. The night Christian drives a company van at the woman he believes is his wife, only to find Leonora walking in the door minutes later, having simply taken another route, is the film’s blackest joke. He has killed a stranger by mistake, and the story never lets him, or us, forget how little that changes between the two of them. The spa resort sequence is just as sharp. Christian slips out to see Xenia while Leonora, back in the room, plays a recording of his voice from the bathroom to cover for him. It is practical, ugly and faintly absurd, which is exactly the register this story needs.

The weaker stretches arrive when the story widens to include the law. Mikael Birkkjær’s police commissioner frames the whole account, since the tale is something he tells his daughter, and he is a necessary presence. But his scenes carry far less charge than anything between husband and wife. The investigation feels like procedure laid over a drama that was already complete. A film this committed to a bitter two-hander could have trusted its leads a little longer. Some turns late in the story also lean on convenience, and the cynicism the film wants us to feel sometimes arrives before the plot has earned it.

Still, the cynicism holds from first scene to last. Loving Adults, Kærlighed for voksne in Danish, reached streaming on 26 August 2022. One viewer on Rotten Tomatoes called it no edge-of-your-seat thriller but fresh and entertaining, which seems a fair measure. It does not overwhelm. It is short on warmth and long on spite, a story about two people who have mistaken possession for love and will pay almost anything rather than lose.

Neither Christian nor Leonora is offered much sympathy, and neither gets an easy way out. Redemption is not on the film’s agenda, and it does not pretend otherwise. Watching them is uncomfortable. You can skip it without missing a landmark, but it is nasty in the right way, well acted, and it never apologises for the people it follows.