Who stays when the air turns heavy and every word feels like a weight? When the simplest gesture — one that once bridged the gap — now falls into silence? “Sult” doesn’t pretend to resolve these questions, but it lingers in their tension with unnerving precision. Rather than offering a tidy narrative of redemption or collapse, it occupies the liminal spaces between longing and restraint, asking what remains when intimacy no longer feels like home but still refuses to leave.
Danish filmmakers Ditte Hansen and Louise Mieritz, adapting Tine Høeg’s 2022 novel “Nye Rejsende,” approach romance less as a genre than as a site of excavation. Their film dissects emotional architecture with clinical attention, revealing not only the visible fractures but the quiet reinforcements that hold a relationship together long past its expiration date. This isn’t a story of passion lost or regained. It’s about emotional fatigue — how we learn to negotiate desire when our inner scripts begin to contradict each other.
Mia Berg, a successful author allergic to permanence, finds solace in the noncommittal rhythms of casual encounters and late-night conversations with her best friend Gro. Gro’s domestic life, anchored by husband and child, serves not as a model but as a counterpoint: it doesn’t tempt Mia so much as it confirms her ambivalence. That contrast sharpens when Emil, a soft-spoken single father who lives upstairs, enters her orbit. The film treats their attraction not as an inevitability, but as a series of calculated hesitations.
There’s no narrative rush to fuse them into a couple. Hansen and Mieritz allow Mia and Emil to drift closer only when their emotional defenses falter, and even then, it’s clear that what draws them together may also quietly undo them. Mia expresses genuine affection for Emil’s children, yet her insistence on a solitary path to motherhood — a child that is hers and hers alone — anchors one of the film’s central conflicts. This desire isn’t framed as selfishness, but as an assertion of agency in a world that still regards female autonomy as conditional.
When Mia undergoes artificial insemination and the procedure fails, the film makes a decisive turn. There’s no melodrama, no soaring score to cushion the emotional blow. Instead, what follows is a kind of quiet implosion, a slow-motion unspooling of expectations. The performances by Rosalinde Mynster and Joachim Fjelstrup are restrained but deeply felt, rendering even the most passive moments charged with unresolved tension. They inhabit their characters like people stuck between intentions, unable to articulate what they need but painfully aware of what they lack.
What’s most striking about “Sult” is its refusal to impose meaning where there is only drift. The film ends not with catharsis but with something far more honest: recognition. That sometimes love doesn’t save us. That affection doesn’t cancel out incompatibility. That even when we fail to build a future with someone, the attempt itself leaves a mark worth keeping. Hansen and Mieritz don’t offer comfort, but something more bracing — a reminder that not all relationships are meant to last, yet some are still worth the ruin.
Film: Sult
Director: Ditte Hansen and Louise Mieritz
Year: 2025
Genres: Comedy/Drama/Romance
Rating: 7/10