The Netflix-exclusive Danish thriller Loving Adults is so much more than simple love gone wrong tale, and it features an ending that is as vexing as it is compelling. Initially released in 2022 and directed by Barbara Topsøe-Rothenborg, Loving Adults follows couple Christian (Dar Salim) and Leonora (Sonja Richter) as their relationship crumbles in a maelstrom of betrayal and murder. Despite its surface-level cliches, the film takes things further by adding the concept of an unreliable narrator which calls into question all the events that unfold on screen. Loving Adults takes a page from other Scandinavian noir stories, but puts a unique and multi-layered spin on the overwrought genre.

Buried beneath a deluge of other original content on the mᴀssively popular streamer, Loving Adults didn’t get much attention from the critical establishment, and viewer reviews on aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes were middling at best. Drawing apt comparisons to movies like Gone Girl, Loving Adults mostly suffered from its own imaginative concept, as the weaving narrative left little room for finesse in the filmmaking. Nevertheless, the tone of Loving Adults was eerie and built towards a climax that ultimately fulfilled everything the movie stood for. It is far from a perfect movie, but it features enough twists and turns to keep even the most cynical viewer engaged throughout.

Leonora’s Blackmail Explained

The Affair Gives Her A Reason To Weaponize His Financial Fraud

Loving Adults vacillates between a gritty and realistic thriller, and a somewhat far-fetched neo-noir, and some details were left vague on purpose while others were almost out of plot convenience. From the moment that Leonora learns of Christian’s affair with Xenia (Sus Wilkins), she seems to wield inordinate power over her estranged husband, and it comes in handy as she exacts her revenge. The whole reason he decides to try to run Leonora over with the van is because she threatens to expose his financial fraud, apparently a strong enough motivator for murder.

Even the best thrillers of all time tend to rely heavily on common story tropes, and Loving Adults treats Christian’s affair with enough gravitas that it essentially anchors the entire film. Christian is clearly afraid of his carefully constructed world falling apart, and he reacts very poorly to the threat of Leonora taking his son away from him, and exposing his financial misdeeds that would look bad. However, when looking deeper, the threats don’t seem to add up to enough to consтιтute attempted murder. Their son is 18 which limits how much Leonora can control him, and his cooking the books would probably only set the business back a bit.

While it could be chalked up to poor writing on the film’s part, the plot inconsistencies could also be attributed to the fact that the Police Commissioner (Mikael Birkkjær) is an unreliable narrator. After all, the Commissioner attempted to tie together disparate events in his story, and it could be that he overemphasized certain details that he knew to be fact in order to make things conform. Certain details that make Leonora look like a master manipulator aren’t established facts, and he could simply be inflating things to help his story hit home.

Who Killed Xenia?

Leonora Is The Most Likely Culprit

Two murders occur by the end of Loving Adults, and neither goes as planned. First, Christian accidentally runs down a jogger thinking it is Leonora, and finally, his lover Xenia is killed. The shocking thing is that it isn’t Christian who plunged the knife into his mistress, but Leonora herself.

Throughout the film, a chastened Christian is stuck being Leonora’s pawn as she uses her higher ground to torture him into doing whatever she wants him to do. However, smartly knowing Christian could never kill Xenia himself, she snuck up behind the other woman and stabbed her to death. All of that is speculation though, since Xenia’s body was never found.

Leonora Killed Her High School Boyfriend

She Was Already Capable Of Murder Before The Events Of Loving Adults

As a way to hammer home the rather cynical outlook of Loving Adults, Leonora wasn’t without sin herself, as she was always suspected of killing her high school boyfriend who took a mysterious tumble off of a cliff. She eventually admits to murdering her beau because he was cheating on her, cementing the fact that she is a cold-blooded tyrant who won’t let Christian go, and she won’t forgive. She admits to the murder, but that is only in the Commissioner’s version of events which isn’t corroborated by any known facts.

Johan’s Mysterious Illness

The Nature Of The Disease Is Deliberately Ambiguous

Medical movie moments are often criticized for their inaccuracy, and the science has historically been mistreated by the entertainment industry. However, Loving Adults doesn’t treat Johan’s (Milo Campanele) mysterious illness with bad medical knowledge, but a lethal dose of intentional vagueness. What is known is that it has been a long-term disease with a bad prognosis, and the fact that Johan makes a recovery is nothing short of a miracle. It is also revealed that Christian donated a portion of his spine to help save his son.

Symbolically speaking, Johan’s illness represents the challenges that being a parent puts on both the father and mother, since Leonora gave up her career as a violinist to care for her ailing child. The fact that he recovers around the same time he turns 18 is also symbolically significant since he is reaching the age where he is less reliant on his parents. Details about Johan’s illness wouldn’t be available to the Commissioner, which means he could have been making it up as a useful symbolic tool to make his story more effective in warning his daughter about parenthood.

The Significance Of The Bones Before The Loving Adults Credits

The Skeletal Remains Likely Belong To Xenia

The Police Commissioner bookends the start and end of Loving Adults, and though he is clearly narrating the events throughout, what happens in the middle is all his tale. However, the ending of Loving Adults offers one last confusing challenge to the audience just before the credits roll when bones are seen being dumped in a lake by Christian and Leonora. It can be ᴀssumed that the bones are Xenia’s and that it confirms the veracity of the Commissioner’s story. Since it is the only moment that takes place outside the officer’s story, it has a bit more truth to it as a real event.

Why The Detective Tells THAT Story To His Daughter Before Her Wedding

The Seemingly Unrelated Story Reveals Some Key Character Info

The Netflix suspense movie reveals almost nothing about the Police Commissioner’s daughter, and all that is known is that she is soon to be wed. The fact that the Commissioner decides to tell the story is an important insight into his character and his cynical outlook on his daughter’s marriage prospects. Obviously, he has a rather dim view of love in general, and the fact that many of the story’s details are largely fabricated means he cooked it up specifically to frighten his daughter. It is revealed that the Commissioner’s wife is ᴅᴇᴀᴅ, and it could be a manifestation of his grief which is perpetually stuck in the anger phase.

Did Everything In Loving Adults Really Happen?

An Unreliable Narrator Throws The Truth Of Events Into Doubt

Since the entire plot of Loving Adults was a story told by the Police Commissioner to his daughter, very little of what happened is verifiable by the facts presented. The narrator himself is a character within the story that appears on several occasions, but it is in that sporadic viewpoint that his entire narrative takes shape. The murder of the jogger and the disappearance of Xenia presumably really happened, but the loose bits in the middle are where the detective’s imagination could be filling in gaps. Christian admitted to the Commissioner that he had an affair with Xenia, but that didn’t explicitly link him to her disappearance.

The cop naturally ᴀssumes the young woman was murdered because she went missing, but the lack of a body makes a crime very difficult to prove. The final sH๏τ of the bones does go a long way in proving that Christian and Leonora are guilty in some way, but it is most likely that the gaps filled in by the detective are only partially correct. The unreliable nature of the narrator could explain why certain details, like Johan’s illness, are vague since he clearly wants to attribute motivation to the people he suspects of murder.

The Real Meaning Of The Loving Adults Ending

Romance Is Never Simple

The ending of Loving Adults is both a confirmation of its themes and something of an analysis of the art of crime fiction in general. The narrator builds a pretty compelling case, but it is more pulp than provable narrative. The ending also speaks to the themes of the film and is a cynical reminder that love can’t possibly be perfect. The narrator tries to warn his daughter of that fact, and he dreams up something truly horrible to scare her away. In the ultimate twist, the daughter decides to marry anyway, perhaps putting a happy ending to the movie’s cynicism.

How The Loving Adults Ending Was Received

Opinions Were Split Among Viewers

While the Danish thriller proved to be a hit with many Netflix subscribers, the response from critics was mixed, though the Loving Adults ending was rarely the deciding factor when it came to reviews. The divisive response, with just as many reviewers enjoying Loving Adults as there were those who responded negatively, seems to come down to expectations of the thriller genre in general. Those who didn’t respond well to the movie cited the lack of clarity and almost soap-opera levels of drama as negatives. However, these were also aspects that those who enjoyed Loving Adults took as positives.

In a word, Loving Adults has been described by many reviews as “cheesy”, though this has been meant as both a good and a bad thing. The review from Decider by critic John Serba sums the sentiment up extremely well. As Serba puts it, “[Loving Adults] is for those of us who prefer a glᴀss of wine from a box accompanied by very expensive cheese.” He goes on to elaborate on this later in the review:

Loving Adults is one of those neat and tidy self-contained plots where nothing is not noteworthy no matter how trifling a detail might be. So it’s contrived, sure, but at least it’s well-thought-out and тιԍнтly woven, told with visual and narrative clarity and professionalism, doling out compelling developments (and maybe a twist or two) regularly, but never too egregiously. Director Barbara Topsoe-Rothenborg isn’t interested in ambiguity here; keeping it relatively straightforward – and avoiding the overwrought, unintentional camp of, say, Deep Water – reaps simple pleasures.

Serba’s thoughts sum up the movie and whether the Loving Adults ending was good or not extremely well. Is it thriller movie that’s trying to drop jaws and redefine the genre? Absolutely not. However, what it does try to achieve is being a watchable and enjoyable viewing experience – and this, from start to finish, Loving Adults does (provided the specific viewer isn’t hoping for anything overly cerebral or any hidden thematic depth).