11/08/2026 - The Swedish director talks about how she delivers a surprising take on a ménage à trois in her new film

(© Edoardo Nerboni/Locarno Film Festival)

In the Locarno competition entry Brave New Love, Maria Bäck, also behind Psychosis in Stockholm, follows Kate (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen), who’s married – and in a relationship with another man (Anders Danielsen Lie). They keep things (mostly) platonic, but when he has to move to another country, Kate can’t accept it.

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Cineuropa: One might expect this to be a realistic film, but you have added some unexpected dreamlike scenes. Why?
Maria Bäck: I never sat down and thought: “I want to make it strange” [laughs]. I just knew I wanted the language of this film to be in the same universe as Kate. I wanted it to reflect her and resist conventions.

Her situation isn’t conventional, that’s true. When we say “affair”, we usually think of something very specific. But then there’s so-called “emotional cheating”.
I didn’t want to provide any clear answers, because I don’t have anything clever to say about how people should live their lives. “She’s in love with two men, so she has to choose” – that’s how people tend to think. That’s the rule. The ideas of being torn between two people and infidelity are such familiar tropes in our culture. When I was making the film, I never met anyone who didn’t have very strong opinions about it. But I prefer to play with these expectations. Life is so much more complicated when you dig a bit deeper.

It’s impossible not to judge others, but you also surround Kate with this lovely “circle of shame”: a group of women who provide understanding.
The character of the priest [who leads the group] was one of the first to come to mind. I thought: “What if she was a bit special?” Then I imagined a group of women shouting out all of these normative ideas, and it just made me laugh. They reflect the audience’s thoughts about Kate. When I was doing some research, I formed a similar group and met similar women. I would tell them Kate’s story, collecting their reactions. It was so much fun.

They embrace her, and so do you – you seem to like everyone here. It’s surprising, too, because most stories about cheating of any kind tend to be so serious and dramatic.
When we follow the same scripts over and over again, that provokes me. You can empathise with almost anyone. That was one of my main motivations. I wanted to investigate everyone here, bring all of these different perspectives together and examine how a “collective” can sometimes hold us back. It tells us how to react in certain situations and shapes our ideas of love. It’s strange how little we have updated these notions. I’m interested in the contrast between the individual and the group. Why are so many people struggling with love these days? Maybe it’s not the relationships themselves, but the script we’re told to follow.

People might be starting to question it. Having just watched The Invite by Olivia Wilde, I guess there’s a greater willingness to challenge old patterns.
Maybe! Growing up in a dysfunctional family in Sweden in the 1980s, all of my ideas came from pop culture. Yet I still felt there was a certain contradiction to it. You are told that all of your feelings are valuable, but you realise that’s not the case. I don’t know if it’s necessarily easier now, because we’re still driven by shame. It’s so deeply rooted in us. But I do hope that we are heading towards something new together, something a bit more open.

You have made a sexy film, but you don’t actually show anything. How did you want to portray desire?
They have a relationship, but they don’t really have sex. I wanted the film to mirror the experience she’s having. Also, I tried to show the loneliness you can feel when you think what you are doing is wrong. I didn’t want to have conventional sex scenes, and every time I was doubting my choices, I tried to do something surprising – even to me. That was the rule for the whole project.

The beginning is so funny – and so ridiculous. They meet in the forest, naked. One might think you were clearly communicating that this story would be light-hearted.
For sure. Kate, as a character, actually came to me when I wrote a poem. She was a woman standing naked in a cave, watching a man. I wanted to find out more. It’s a silly answer, in a way, but it’s all part of the process. You can survive almost anything if you have humour. I have felt that way all my life. Even if something is tragic, you have to be able to view it from a distance. This has been my way of surviving, too: with humour, friendship and love, and being able to connect in the darkness. That’s the way I wanted to tell this story.