Saeng, center, working in Pattaya, as seen in Heartbound: A Different Kind of Love Story (TIFF)

World premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, the husband-and-wife team of Janus Metz (Armadillo) and anthropologist Sine Plambech center their documentary, Heartbound: A Different Kind of Love Story, on a Thai-born, Danish matchmaker. Now in her late 50s, Sommai has been married to a Danish citizen for nearly 25 years and has become a go-to intermediator, pairing Thai women with lonely, working-class bachelors in a small town in northern Denmark. A reported 83 percent of Thai immigrants in this country are women, the largest nationality group that Danish men marry apart from Danes.

Sommai’s 31-year-old niece, Kae, who is also from her aunt’s home village in Northeast Thailand, has arrived in Denmark on a three-month tourist visa to meet and greet a prospective husband; the younger woman has a teenage son to support back home. When she first meets Kjeld, who is a tall blonde man in his mid-30s, her reactions are as inscrutable as his movements are tentative. That could also describe most of the onscreen interactions between the men and women. Besides the awkward, blind-date tension, the language barrier between the two becomes a challenge that both have to leap over. Overall, Kae and Kjeld’s courtship is more pragmatic than romantic, with Kae rationalizing that Kjeld is “good enough.”

Kae will have to live with Kjeld before they get married because, as Sommai explains to her, that’s how things are done in Denmark. Sommai further advices her, “Don’t hold back in bed.” To which the young woman responds, “I wasn’t born yesterday.” Kjeld, who got in touch with Sommai through a newspaper ad, will have to obtain a residency permit for Kae and put down a deposit. If she leaves during the seven-year trial period, he will lose that money, and not once is the question raised  if Sommai is paid for her services or if she’s simply benevolent.

The filmmakers accompany Sommai to her home town, where she has a built a second home, and the film begins trailing Saeng, for whom Sommai promises to find a Danish husband. But Saeng’s 22 years old and needs to be 24 in order to obtain a Danish residency permit. She also has a young son to raise, so she makes the decision to ride along on a moped heading toward Pattaya, the fulcrum of the country’s sex tourism trade—and where Sommai herself worked decades ago—and start working at a bar popular among Finnish men. (Before leaving her family, Saeng asks her mom not to tell her father that she’s gone off to the big city.) There she’s mentored by her longtime friend Lom, who also works in a sex bar.

Nearly everyone featured on camera understandably holds back and is forthcoming to a limited degree, making the film only as absorbing as what its subjects reveal—the filmmakers can only delve so deep. Yet alone and away from men, a group of Thai women married to Danes lower their guard and engage in some down-and-dirty talk. Nevertheless, the film presents an illuminating, larger-scale picture of the international marriage market. Filmed over 10 years, the multithreaded story line follows an unpredictable, murky road map, with some of the men and women achieving their goals—stable marriages, the ability to help family financially—while others end up back at square one.

The narrative will hold viewers’ interest as they find out what has happened to these couples and individuals over the years. If you bet on which relationship will last, you are likely to lose, and time does not prove kind to everyone. Otherwise, the film may be frustratingly evasive, as the participants tend to put their best faces forward before the camera.

The concluding 20 minutes rush by, with a lot of left-field revelations introduced late, one of which seems to come from another movie entirely, as well as the idea that for at least one Danish man, Thailand—and its women—represents a dream world. How the story lines play out will likely raise more questions that the film answers. Still, what it successfully and accurately affirms, in the words of one husband, is that the world is indeed “strange and messy.”