Three Loves (2025) by Lukasz Grzegorzek

Poland | 2025 | 100 min | Drama

Fresh from divorce, forty-year-old actress Lena is determined to rebuild her life and reclaim her independence. Warsaw nightlife leads her toward Kundel, a charismatic younger student, and into an intensely physical relationship where the boundaries between intimacy and desire begin to blur. What initially feels like sexual and emotional reinvention gradually becomes more complicated as her past refuses to release its grip.

That past takes the form of Jan, Lena’s ex-husband and a successful lawyer who cannot accept that their marriage is over. A spyware app installed on Lena’s phone and an apartment rented opposite her windows transform heartbreak into surveillance, making control an increasingly disturbing presence inside her new life. Grzegorzek mixes romantic drama with erotic-thriller tension to explore love in its more contradictory forms: liberating, obsessive, sensual and potentially toxic.

➡️ Key Takeaway: Three Loves turns post-divorce reinvention into a provocative collision between desire, freedom and obsessive control, asking what happens when one person’s attempt to move forward becomes another person’s refusal to let go.

Three Loves is particularly compelling for viewers drawn to adult European relationship dramas that refuse to divide intimacy neatly into healthy and unhealthy, liberating and destructive. Lena’s attraction to Kundel offers excitement and reinvention, while Jan’s inability to accept their separation introduces a darker form of attachment. The film deliberately places these competing desires inside the same emotional landscape rather than presenting love as something easily categorized.

Grzegorzek also makes a notable stylistic shift by combining romantic drama, erotic-thriller elements and dark humor. That mixture gives Three Loves a more provocative identity than a conventional post-divorce drama, while Marta Nieradkiewicz’s Lena provides the perspective through which changing ideas of intimacy, independence and control collide.

➡️ Key Takeaway: Watch Three Loves for its sensual but uncomfortable examination of contemporary intimacy—a film interested in the moment when passion stops feeling liberating and starts becoming possession.

Three Loves emerged prominently through Poland’s festival circuit, including New Horizons and the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia, where it competed in the main competition and won Best Music for Piotr Szulc (Steez83). Festival Scope Pro also lists the film within the 2025 Polish Film Festival selection and identifies its Best Music recognition.

What gives the film particular contemporary relevance, however, is the way it brings technology into the mechanics of romantic obsession. Jan does not merely watch Lena emotionally from a distance: spyware gives him digital access while physical surveillance allows him to remain present in a life that is supposed to have moved beyond him. Against that intrusion, Lena’s relationship with Kundel becomes more than a romance—it represents an attempt to reclaim desire and autonomy after divorce.

➡️ Key Takeaway: Three Loves makes the familiar toxic-love story feel distinctly contemporary by showing how digital surveillance can transform jealousy into continuous access, turning the inability to let go into a dangerous form of control.

Three Loves sits at the intersection of Power Dynamics and Sexuality, using Lena’s post-divorce relationships to examine what happens when desire, freedom and control begin occupying the same emotional space. Her relationship with the younger Kundel represents sexual rediscovery and the possibility of constructing a life outside her marriage, while Jan’s inability to accept their separation transforms attachment into surveillance. Love is therefore presented not as a stable emotion but as something capable of shifting between liberation, dependency and possession.

The film’s most contemporary dimension is the connection between intimacy and technological control. Jan’s use of spyware allows obsession to continue beyond physical proximity, turning access to Lena’s private life into a form of power. Against this intrusion, her sexual autonomy becomes more significant: choosing whom to desire and how to live after divorce becomes part of a broader struggle over who gets to control her identity.

➡️ Key Takeaway: Three Loves reflects a contemporary relationship trend in which stories about desire increasingly examine the power surrounding intimacy—especially when love, jealousy and digital surveillance become difficult to separate.

➡️ Movie Trend: Power Dynamics & Sexuality

Three Loves is particularly suited to audiences who prefer relationship films where characters are allowed to be contradictory, sexual and emotionally complicated. Lena is not simply escaping one relationship and entering another; she is negotiating what intimacy means after divorce while two very different forms of male desire surround her. That makes the film more provocative than a straightforward story of romantic reinvention.

Its strongest audience may also be viewers interested in how contemporary cinema is changing the portrayal of women in midlife. At forty, Lena’s story is driven by sexuality, experimentation and the desire to reconstruct herself rather than retreat into conventional narratives of divorce and recovery. Her age is not the end of romantic possibility—it becomes the starting point for a more unstable exploration of freedom.

➡️ Key Takeaway: Three Loves is for viewers who want adult relationship cinema to embrace desire, contradiction and moral discomfort rather than reducing love to clearly defined heroes, villains or happy endings.

Three Loves participates in a broader shift toward giving middle-aged female characters sexual and narrative agency. Lena’s divorce does not position her primarily as someone recovering from romantic failure; it opens a new phase of desire, experimentation and self-definition. That distinction matters because mainstream relationship cinema has historically given younger women far more freedom to occupy stories centered on sexual discovery.

The film also demonstrates how European filmmakers can make relationship drama feel more contemporary by introducing the realities surrounding modern intimacy. Smartphones, surveillance, age differences and changing expectations around personal autonomy create new forms of conflict that traditional romantic triangles could not explore in the same way. The result is a relationship film in which the central question is increasingly not “Who will she choose?” but “Who gets to define how she lives?”

➡️ Key Takeaway: Three Loves points toward a more contemporary form of adult relationship cinema—one where female desire drives the story, technology reshapes jealousy and romantic conflict becomes a struggle over autonomy rather than simply a choice between partners.

Three Loves takes the familiar architecture of a love triangle and destabilizes it by making autonomy more important than romantic choice. Lena is not simply caught between an ex-husband and a younger lover. She is attempting to reconstruct herself after divorce while the men around her represent radically different relationships with desire: one appears to open possibilities, while the other refuses to surrender access to the life she is trying to leave behind.

That distinction gives the film its psychological tension. Romance, sexuality, jealousy and surveillance continually overlap, preventing intimacy from remaining emotionally neutral. Łukasz Grzegorzek is less interested in asking which relationship Lena should choose than in exploring what happens when other people’s desire begins competing with her right to determine the boundaries of her own life.

➡️ Key Takeaway: Three Loves reinvents the romantic triangle as a struggle over autonomy, asking not who Lena should love but whether she can remain in control of her own desire.

The screenplay builds its drama through contrasting interpretations of intimacy. Lena wants to move forward after divorce, Kundel introduces the excitement and instability of new desire, and Jan represents a relationship that has formally ended but psychologically refuses to disappear. Their collision allows the film to move between romantic drama, erotic tension and increasingly unsettling psychological territory.

What makes the structure effective is that these relationships are not treated as completely separate emotional worlds. Lena’s past influences her present, while her new freedom intensifies Jan’s obsession. The resulting triangle becomes less about romantic competition and more about how differently people understand love when desire, rejection and ownership become entangled.

➡️ Key Takeaway: The film uses its love triangle to show how the same emotion can be experienced as freedom by one person and possession by another.

Grzegorzek avoids turning Lena’s post-divorce life into a conventional empowerment narrative. Her sexual reinvention can be exhilarating without automatically being safe, while her vulnerability does not erase her agency. That complexity allows the film to approach adult sexuality with more contradiction than either a straightforward romance or a conventional erotic thriller.

The tonal mixture is equally important. Three Loves moves between sensuality, humor, emotional awkwardness and darker psychological tension, reflecting how relationships rarely fit comfortably into a single genre. The approach makes the increasingly disturbing elements of Jan’s behavior more effective because they emerge from a recognizable emotional environment rather than a world that announces itself immediately as threatening.

➡️ Key Takeaway: Grzegorzek’s strength is allowing desire to remain contradictory—liberating and destabilizing, pleasurable and risky, intimate and potentially controlling.

Marta Nieradkiewicz gives Lena the complexity required for a story built around competing forms of intimacy. She has to communicate a woman emerging from divorce without reducing that transition to either emotional damage or uncomplicated liberation. Lena can desire excitement, make uncertain choices and defend her independence simultaneously, making her feel like an active participant in the story rather than an object positioned between two men.

Marcin Czarnik’s Jan provides the darker counterforce. His inability to accept separation gradually reframes romantic attachment as surveillance and possession, while Mieszko Chomka’s Kundel represents the disruptive energy of Lena’s new life. Together, the performances make the triangle less about choosing between two partners than about competing ideas of what intimacy permits one person to demand from another.

➡️ Key Takeaway: Nieradkiewicz keeps Lena at the center of her own story, making her sexual and emotional contradictions essential to the film rather than problems it needs to resolve.

Weronika Bilska’s cinematography has an especially interesting thematic function because Three Loves is fundamentally concerned with who gets to look at Lena and under what conditions. Erotic intimacy makes looking consensual and desirable, while Jan’s surveillance transforms observation into intrusion. The same basic act—watching another person—can therefore communicate attraction in one context and control in another.

That contrast gives the visual language significance beyond creating atmosphere. Lena wants the freedom to make herself visible on her own terms, yet technology and physical surveillance allow someone else to observe her without permission. The film consequently turns visibility itself into contested territory.

➡️ Key Takeaway: Three Loves makes looking political: the difference between desire and surveillance is ultimately the difference between being seen by choice and being watched without it.

At its core, Three Loves is concerned with the relationship between desire and autonomy. Lena’s new sexual relationship matters because it represents her ability to construct an identity beyond marriage, but the film does not suggest that sexual freedom automatically produces emotional certainty. Reinvention can be exhilarating while still creating new vulnerabilities.

Jan’s behavior reveals the opposite side of that equation. His inability to accept Lena’s autonomy converts emotional attachment into entitlement, and technology gives that entitlement practical power. The spyware therefore carries larger thematic meaning: it represents the belief that previous intimacy grants continuing access to another person’s life even after consent has been withdrawn.

➡️ Key Takeaway: Three Loves argues that the defining boundary between intimacy and control is autonomy—desire remains meaningful only when the person experiencing it retains the freedom to choose.

What distinguishes Three Loves is the combination of midlife female sexuality with technologically enabled obsession. Lena is forty, divorced and actively pursuing desire, placing a woman at the center of a kind of erotic reinvention still more commonly assigned to younger characters. Her story refuses the assumption that midlife should make sexuality quieter or less disruptive.

At the same time, the film updates the obsessive-ex narrative for an era in which physical separation no longer guarantees privacy. Smartphones and surveillance technology allow Jan to remain invisibly present, turning an old emotional problem—the inability to let someone go—into a distinctly contemporary form of control. That collision between sexual reinvention and digital intrusion gives the film its sharpest identity.

➡️ Key Takeaway: What makes Three Loves distinctive is its collision of female midlife desire and digital surveillance, transforming a familiar romantic triangle into a contemporary story about who controls intimacy after love ends.

Babygirl is the strongest recent companion to Three Loves because both center middle-aged women whose sexual reinvention destabilizes established ideas about intimacy and control. Nicole Kidman plays Romy, a successful CEO whose affair with a younger intern creates an increasingly complicated exchange of professional power, sexual submission and personal risk.

Where Three Loves places Lena between post-divorce freedom and an ex-husband’s obsessive surveillance, Babygirl explores a different contradiction: a woman who appears powerful professionally deliberately enters a relationship where control becomes part of desire. Both films refuse to treat female midlife sexuality as either straightforward liberation or moral failure.

Lover offers a darker relationship-focused companion to Three Loves, examining what happens when a long-term romance becomes increasingly dominated by possessiveness, insecurity and emotional dependency. Rather than romanticizing the intensity of the relationship, the film asks whether love remains enough when one partner’s behavior begins restricting the other’s freedom.

That makes its connection with Three Loves particularly strong around the boundary between attachment and control. Both films challenge the assumption that intense emotion automatically validates a relationship, instead asking when someone’s determination to hold onto another person becomes precisely the reason that person needs to escape.

Noémie Merlant pushes female desire, male violence and personal freedom into considerably wilder genre territory in The Balconettes. Set during a Marseille heat wave, the film follows three women whose fascination with a neighbor develops into an increasingly dangerous situation, combining sexuality with horror, comedy and feminist revenge. JustWatch confirms U.S. digital availability.

The tonal approach is very different from Three Loves, but the underlying connection is valuable: both films make female desire active rather than passive while exposing the power structures surrounding it. For viewers interested in Three Loves because Lena refuses to allow male expectations to determine the boundaries of her sexuality, Merlant’s more provocative film is a natural next discovery.

➡️ Key Takeaway: Start with Babygirl for another provocative exploration of midlife female desire and power, choose Lover for the darker boundary between love and possessiveness, and The Balconettes for a more radical collision of female sexuality, freedom and male control.

Three Loves takes the familiar ingredients of adult relationship drama—divorce, a younger lover and an ex-husband unable to move on—and makes them distinctly contemporary. Łukasz Grzegorzek’s most effective decision is to shift the central question away from which man Lena should choose. What matters is whether she can construct a new life in which desire belongs to her rather than becoming something another person attempts to control.

Marta Nieradkiewicz gives that idea a complicated human center. Lena’s sexual reinvention is neither presented as uncomplicated empowerment nor punished as reckless behavior. Desire can be liberating and destabilizing simultaneously, while Jan’s surveillance pushes the film toward more disturbing territory by demonstrating how easily emotional entitlement can become technological intrusion. The premise explicitly connects his obsession to spyware and physical surveillance.

The film’s mixture of erotic drama, relationship comedy and psychological tension will not work equally for viewers expecting a conventional romance. But that instability is also what makes Three Loves interesting. It belongs to a contemporary strand of European cinema increasingly willing to treat middle-aged female sexuality as active, contradictory and worthy of stories that are not organized around conventional romantic fulfillment.

➡️ Final Verdict: 4.1/5 — A sensual and psychologically provocative relationship drama that turns a familiar love triangle into a sharper contemporary struggle over desire, privacy and the right to move on.

➡️ Key Takeaway: Three Loves is worth discovering for the way it combines female midlife desire, sexual reinvention and digital surveillance, transforming a romantic triangle into a contemporary examination of who gets to control intimacy after a relationship ends.