The Big Picture

Loveable
is a poignant and realistic exploration of a marriage on the brink through the eyes of Maria, a woman dealing with self-worth and anger issues.
The film delves into generational trauma, self-discovery, and the importance of self-love and acceptance, with Helga Guren delivering a career-defining performance as Maria.
The film avoids conventional dramatic practices and offers a universal message about the challenges of love and relationships, standing out among recent films that tackle similar subjects.

Female rage. Who doesn’t love it? After decades of women being sidelined and forced into submissive roles, movies that allow the girls to scream until they lose their voice and embark on vengeful rampages just never get old. These types of tales are usually seen in the horror genre, with many a final girl fighting back against her tormentor and avenging her friends and family. But what about when rage grabs hold of an ordinary woman and becomes a force of self-destruction rather than protection? There’s no villain to take it out on, no death to exact revenge for. Lilja Ingolfsdottir’s feature debut Loveable (Elskling in its native Norway) may appear as a romantic drama on the surface, a close look at the inner workings of a marriage that gives way to the pressures of life and family. But as the movie unfolds, it becomes a story of loving, appreciating, and understanding oneself. Led by a tour de force performance from Helga Guren, Loveable is an astute, tender, and unflinching portrait of what it is to hate who you are, and how we can grow to love the person we can never leave.

Loveable (2024) Release Date October 11, 2024 Director Lilja Ingolfsdottir Cast Helga Guren , Oddgeir Thune , Elisabeth Sand , Marte Magnusdotter Solem , Heidi Gjermundsen Broch Runtime 101 Minutes Writers Lilja Ingolfsdottir Studio(s) Nordisk Film Norway , Amarcord Distributor(s) Nordisk Film Production AS Expand

What Is ‘Loveable’ About?
The opening of Loveable may remind some viewers of the beginning of Noah Baumbach’s Oscar-winning divorce drama, Marriage Story. In Baumbach’s film, the two leads are asked to list all the things they love about each other, immediately offering the happy history of this marriage that has gone awry. In Loveable, Maria’s (Guren) voiceover narrates how she met and fell in love with her second husband, Sigmund (Oddgeir Thune). Maria has two children with her ex-husband, a marriage that ended acrimoniously. As she tries to rediscover herself and her career post-divorce, she meets the handsome and charismatic Sigmund at a party and is immediately entranced by him.

It takes a while for them to meet again, but once they do, they quickly fall madly in love. The movie then jumps seven years and the rose-tinted fervor of the honeymoon phase has been replaced by the grey realities of married life. Maria and Sigmund have two children of their own now, and they live together with Maria’s two older children, including the now teenage Alma (Maja Tothammer-Hruza) who is incredibly volatile towards her mother, relentlessly bashing her with insults at every second and demanding permission to move to her father’s house.

Maria has given up her career to raise the children, which she mostly does on her own as Sigmund, a musician, spends weeks at a time on the road. After his return from six weeks away from the family, a mundane argument gives way to an explosive row that ends with Sigmund considering divorce. The rest of the film follows Maria during this fallout, as Sigmund’s insistence that she needs help in handling her anger leads her to look inward and really examine the person she has become. Between being away from her children, her husband who she loves wanting to leave her, and her reckoning with the relationship behaviors that have been passed down to her from her own mother, Maria learns that to fix her family she must first fix herself. It’s essentially the European, arthouse cinematic treatment of RuPaul’s catchphrase “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love somebody else?” It’s a cliché but as Loveable so deftly shows, it’s undeniably true.

‘Loveable’ Is Similar to ‘Marriage Story’ on the Surface
About a quarter of the way through Loveable, you realize that the similarities to Marriage Story end when the movie shifts focus from the breakdown of a marriage to Maria’s self-discovery. Sigmund ignores her calls and texts, and she paces the lonely flat a friend has lent her. She tries to visit Alma at school but she is aggressively rebuffed and told she is an embarrassment. When she meets Sigmund at his work and starts hitting herself and exclaiming that she’s no good, she takes on his advice to see a therapist, but only if they go together. The film is quick to dispel any ideas that Maria is a victim and nothing more in the story. She does get angry, she doesn’t handle her daughter’s temper well, and she can’t accept the love and care Sigmund tries to offer her and responds with hostility.

What makes Maria such a compelling character is that we can both sympathize with her and acknowledge that she does not always do the right thing. She is overworked, she is constantly in the firing line of her daughter’s misguided wrath, and the men in her life take her for granted. While Maria’s behavior may not be conducive to a healthy marriage and family, it’s clear that this reaction has not been borne out of nothing.

Loveable is about as realistic a portrayal of female rage as you can get. This is the type of film every person, whatever gender, and whatever relationship status, can see parts of themselves in. Behind Maria’s screaming and anger is a terrified person who is at the mercy of her husband and children. While she may seem like she doesn’t need anything from anyone, she quickly crumbles at the idea of being alone. She’s a layered, complex, and hypocritical character but that’s what makes her and her story so compelling. Loveable is not trying to overdramatize divorce or glamorize the fallout and reunion of relationships. It sets out to craft an honest and incisive account of how lonely it can be when someone can’t accept who they are.

‘Loveable’ Explores Self-Love and Acceptance
Image Via Nordisk Film Production

In many Hollywood productions, a story like this would end happily with the couple getting back together. But by the end of the movie, you care less about Maria and Sigmund resolving their issues and more about Maria solving her own problems. What Loveable so astutely understands about mental health and relationships is the importance of professional help. Maria does have a friend to rely on, but the person who finally gives her exactly what she needs is her therapist. One of her solo sessions sees the inner child in Maria finally get the soothing care she has so desperately longed for, a cathartic experience for both her and the audience.

The film is also one of the best explorations of generational trauma. As Maria visits her mother, we slowly see it dawn on her that they are much more similar than she cares to admit. When she finally is able to look past her own daughter’s constant belittling and badgering of her, she knows how to give her exactly what she needs. “No wonder you’re like this,” Maria says through tears as she holds a bawling Alma. As Laura Dern’s girlboss lawyer so perfectly summed up in Marriage Story, society just cannot accept a less-than-perfect mother. Maria has been a mother for 15-odd years and has four children, and she is still learning and making mistakes as a parent. Ingolfsdottir’s script looks past the idealistic Hollywood portrayal of the mother and allows Maria the grace to mess up and figure out how best to raise her kids.

It truly is baffling that this is Ingolfsdottir’s feature debut. From the opening montage of Maria and Sigmund’s first meeting, Loveable is a dizzying and invasive experience for the audience. Invasive not in that it forces itself upon the viewer but how Maria’s introspection extends to the audience, as the film will surely have you examining the intricacies of your own relationships. It carves a poignant and universal message out of what is usually perceived as mundane. Ingolfsdottir’s script is sharp, brutal, tender, and hopeful all at once. It allows all its characters to go through the motions of how painful life can be without forcing conventional dramatic practices. This searing introspection of what it means to feel loveable and to feel appreciated is one of the most poignant and well-crafted human dramas of recent cinema. Movies like these usually follow a woman as she has a second chance at love, but Maria’s story starts and ends with her relationship with herself. While finding one’s self is a popular trope across cinema, it has rarely been done as acutely as Loveable.

Helga Guren Gives the Performance of a Lifetime in ‘Loveable’
Image Via Karlovy Vary Film Festival

This is a career-defining performance for Helga Guren. Maria goes on a journey that brings her to numerous destinations, from rage to despair to desperation to depression, and Guren captures every last feeling with nuance. She never makes Maria into one thing to make it easier for the audience to understand her. Guren goes to ugly places that not every actor would, and is never afraid to make Maria “unlikable” in the eyes of the audience. Her story comes to a devastating turning point near the end of the film as Guren looks directly into the camera in an incredibly moving scene of self-actualization.

The relationship with one’s self is criminally underrepresented and self-hatred is such a universal struggle yet difficult to translate to the screen. Guren plays Maria’s battle with herself with all the conflicting emotions that come with understanding yourself later in life. Thune is a soulful scene partner who also never makes his character an out-and-out villain. In a story outline that might have you think you need to take sides, Maria and Sigmund are always on the same side, it’s the other half of them that they’re up against. Marte Solem may overplay the angsty teenager at times, but when it’s her turn to finally take off the facade, it makes for one of the film’s most heartbreaking and poignant moments.

Loveable goes miles beyond the various divorce and marriage movies we’ve seen in recent years. It doesn’t exploit people’s misery for dramatic effect, it doesn’t paint the woman as a psychotic antichrist or the man as a bumbling fool. It looks at marriage with a keen eye for all the good and all the bad that floods in when two people form a life together. There’s also a great deal of humor that softens its relentless takedown of the fairytale idea of marriage. For anyone who has ever felt unworthy of love, this movie is the honest and soothing antidote that reminds us of just how complex being alive is.

REVIEW Loveable (2024) Loveable starts out as a marital drama before becoming a captivating account of self-love and appreciation.ProsLilja Ingolfsdottir’s script explores the topic of self-hatred and worth with nuance and care.Helga Guren is exceptional in the lead role, capturing the many different facets of Maria.Loveable gives us real, human characters who do not play into cinematic conventions.

Loveable had its World Premiere at the 2024 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.