Polygamy, a double life, the Scandi lifestyle – and everything just has to be “hygge”. Cosy. Swedish director Bäck, familiar to RIGA IFF audiences for Psychosis in Stockholm (2020), takes us into a dramedy that asks: is having parallel relationships a form of cheating, or perhaps something rooted in human nature? Or is it simply loving ourselves most, and that love being the most important of all?

A dinner-table conversation with her husband and teenage daughter. Hypnotherapist Kate listens to the plot of a documentary being recounted: a pregnant polar bear fights for survival. After the meal, she scrolls through videos of male animals carrying their young. Flora and fauna offer up a whole range of models for relationships, life and reproduction – and here she is, with two partners. She loves her husband, Orla. She also loves Andreas, an archaeologist with whom she has no physical intimacy. After years of secrecy, the fragile balance of Kate’s double life begins to unravel. She embarks on an existential struggle to redefine love and the boundaries of “normal” behaviour.

As Oscar Wilde once said, we cannot live with secrets, nor can we live without them. Screened in the main competition at the Locarno Film Festival, Bäck’s film offers unexpected answers about what constitutes a “normal” relationship, and about which realities can be shared and which remain confined to our private worlds. In her second feature, which is in conversation with Rohmer’s philosophical exercises, the filmmaker traces the symptoms of contemporary society and partnership with nonchalant humour and touches of the absurd, illuminating the painful blind spots of modern love. Isn’t our idea of fidelity, family and “proper” relationships merely one of many possible ways of living? Or are we suffering from the little maladies of the “Me Me Me” generation? The film stars some of Northern Europe’s best-known actors, Kathrine Thorborg Johansen, Anders Danielsen Lie and Simon Sears.