Forever Now
2017 · 19m · Denmark
Directed by Kristian Håskjold
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A couple in the middle of breaking up spontaneously decides to take MDMA together; written by director Kristian Håskjold and his ex-girlfriend Trille Cecilie Uldall-Spanner from their real-life experience, the film captures the swirling emotions of a mutual ending.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a breakup film, sure, but the move to process a real ending through a shared drug experience instead of screaming or silence is genuinely perverse—takes the standard relationship autopsy and makes it hallucinogenic and almost tender, which shouldn't work but does.
Håskjold's approach to intimate drama sits in productive tension with the tradition of chemically-altered cinema; the restraint of the formal choices—the editing, the color palette—keeps the MDMA from becoming spectacle and instead lets it be a language for mutual grief.
The singular choice here is letting the drug be honest rather than transformative: no visual fireworks, no metaphorical excess, just two people seeing each other clearly for maybe the last time, and that decision to strip the premise down to its emotional core makes it devastate.