Denmark’s 2019 entry for the Best International Feature Film Academy Award bears the deceptively carefree title Queen of Hearts, but don’t think this movie is going to go Juice Newton on you. In director May el-Toukhy’s dark potboiler draped in tasteful Scandi noir minimalism, the real theme song is Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” ominously featured on the soundtrack to foreshadow a disastrous liaison between an uptight, seemingly upright lawyer and her confused stepson. The film will lead viewers to a place where taboo sex and an unyielding lead character offer no emotional shield from the cold, hard-hitting tragedy within.

Steel-eyed, high-achieving Anne (Trine Dyrholm, so commanding as a doughty rocker in Nico, 1988) has her life under control. She keeps her twin daughters on a tight leash and her nice-guy husband Peter (Magnus Krepper) on an even tighter one, briskly overriding his vague noises of dissatisfaction. She intimidates adversaries and colleagues alike as a deft, no-nonsense lawyer who never holds back her opinions defending victims of domestic violence and abuse. Her family life takes place in an elegant if slightly sterile modern house with impeccable gun-metal gray interiors, surrounded by inviting but isolating forest.

When Anne’s slender, hooded-eyed stepson Gustav (Gustav Lindh) steps into the sanctum, Anne will slowly discover that the only thing she can’t discipline is herself. She catches the boy stealing from the family and strikes a complicit bargain to conceal the theft—a warning of how far this officer of the court is suddenly prepared to bend the rules. Anne finds herself restlessly turned on by overhearing Gustav having sex with a teenage girlfriend and bored with the banal adult conversation of household guests.

It takes a long time for the steam to gather, but Anne and Gustav will go from stolen glances to furtive touches to full-on banging in bedrooms and on the leafy grounds. The possibility of the two getting caught is frightening and their sense that the attraction is unstoppable even more so. Why would stickler Anne drop her restraint? We’re not sure, but her abandon eventually comes to feel like an extension of her formidable will, the ultimate case of wanting her cake and devouring it too. 

El-Toukhy’s formal control and buildup of details and characterizations keep her film just barely outside the lurid zone where such risqué material could stray. When the May-December pair finally couple, the blunt, unromantic encounter leaves both parties stunned and disbelieving; Dyrholm’s face reflects the dual states of alert and fresh one minute, crumpled and eroded the next. At an awkward moment for Anne, el-Toukhy places her features in shadows, highlighting how desperately this bold woman is trying to hide. Lindh creates a sense of pathos and misery behind a teenager’s wary bravado. His desire for connection will prove more desperate than it looks.

Besides its heroine, other aspects of the film venture into dangerous decision-making. The filmmakers presents Anne’s legal efforts on behalf of teenage rape victims without irony, even as she seduces a trusting, vulnerable minor, although this juxtaposition may serve as a satire of bourgeois hypocrisy, or of lawyers’ tendencies to outsmart themselves. A melodramatic yet underwhelming car accident has Lifetime Movie channel overtones, and the film hits a tipping point when Peter gets wind of the forbidden trysts going on under his roof and Anne maneuvers to reassert mastery of the situation with go-for-broke lies that shift her character into an ethical ninth circle of hell.

It’s a daring move on the director’s part to turn Anne into a truly unethical person, a liar whose gaslighting, imperious denials, and finger-pointing make her the equal of any man trying to avoid responsibility for fouling the family nest. Perhaps we should have been prepared for Anne’s bloody-mindedness, but the dark consequences of her actions reverberate with a harshness that will last far beyond the misguided midlife-crisis seduction that set them in motion. Queen of Hearts leaves the characters’ fate open, but with the distinct, disquieting possibility that its stiff-necked antiheroine will prevail, even over the disaster she helped put in motion.