Summary
Loving Adults’ narrative has all the backbone of an invertebrate.
Anna Ekerg’s novel has a cynical view of marriage, it seems. The thin line between love and hate has never been so wide between her characters Christian (Game of Thrones Darin Salim) and Leonora (The Homesman’s Sonja Richter).
After 20 years of marriage and raising a son who has been ill for a decade, they have grown apart. Christian has started an affair with Xenia (Domino’s Sus Wilkins), his prized architect at his construction firm. She wants a family and demands he leaves his wife immediately. Big mistake because Leonora is a married woman two decades into her marriage and gets what she wants. As she tells Christian to either break up with his lover or she will go to the police with the dirt she has on him. Christian sees only one way out, and it’s darker than you would expect.
Directed by Barbara Rothenborg (Food Club), with an adaptation by Anders Rønnow Klarlund (Strings) and Jacob Weinreich (The Last Client), it is nothing more than a Lifetime movie entry.
Yes, the production values are good, and the two leads are better than the material here, but the narrative has all the backbone of an invertebrate. A mid-movie twist is naturally surprising and should build cat and mouse suspense, not only between the police and the main characters but the leads themselves.
Instead, there is no one to stand up and make life difficult for these two. We are to believe the police will naturally trust the word of a couple that is connected to or at least live near two murders within a couple of weeks.
The viewer must swallow that a swanky hotel has no security camera around the facility, nor would the police have access to surveillance of roadways or think to check Christian’s business assets. There is also a needless plot point about Leonora’s past that is nothing but hackneyed. The cold and calculated Richter, who brings a bit of life into a character that is nothing more than your cliched, jilted woman, makes the film somewhat interesting.
However, while her manipulation in the script works on a cornball, cheesy level, I was howling by the end. Imagine cadaver dogs leading the police officers to a trail that ends at a lake, watching the main suspect lighting up a floating bomb fire with a dead animal smell in the air, and just walking away without further investigation. All with a narrator’s own subplot, where the detective on the case is telling this story to his daughter on her wedding day?
Loving Adults, God bless you. You are so over the top I am giving you an extra star just for the audacity alone.
Read More: Loving Adults Ending Explained
