Queen of Hearts

May el-Toukhy's second feature took the World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award at Sundance in 2019, swept the Bodils the following year and was Denmark's Academy Award submission. It is built entirely around Trine Dyrholm, who has been the finest Danish screen actor of her generation for two decades and has rarely been given a part this uncomfortable.

Dyrholm plays Anne, a lawyer who represents abused children, married to a doctor and living in a modernist house at the edge of a forest. Gustav Lindh plays her husband's teenage son, arriving from Sweden to live with them. El-Toukhy and co-writer Maren Louise Käehne construct the film so that the audience understands the power in the room long before anyone in it admits to knowing, and Jasper Spanning shoots the house as a place with too much glass and nowhere to hide.

It holds 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and drew comparisons to Vinterberg's Festen for its handling of what a comfortable family will tell itself. Dyrholm's performance is the reason to watch: she gives Anne no sympathy-seeking gestures at all, and the film is far harder for it.