Anne+: The Film (2021) An In-Depth Review of a Queer Woman’s Self-Discovery and the Aesthetics of Relationships

Isolation, solidarity, and the yearning for an authentic life are universal deficiencies that shake us in our late twenties. The belief that one can find a complete self within a union with another is sometimes nothing more than a sweet illusion, and true growth begins only with the courage to face one’s own interiority.

This film courageously deviates from the trajectory of a life cultivated to meet the gaze and expectations of others, calmly unfolding like an essay the fierce insights of a woman constructing her own independent narrative.

🌿 Moments When This Film Penetrates Deeply

• To you, who are drifting while hiding your true feelings, deceived by the stability of familiarity.
• To you, who are losing boundaries and wavering between a form of relationship (open relationship) and intimate jealousy.
• To you, who have lost life’s goals and direction, and want to ask who the true protagonist of your life is.

The reason you must read until the end is that, moving beyond simple romance, it structurally analyzes the psychological shifts of a woman seeking an autonomous self within the solidarity of the queer community, thereby offering a clear milestone for those standing at a turning point in life.

🎞 Notes Prior to Viewing

In the process of addressing the sexual and emotional identity of a queer woman in her late twenties, this work depicts physical intimacy between characters somewhat honestly and sensually. However, rather than focusing on provocative staging, this serves as a core mechanism to illustrate the process of self-acceptance through sexual exploration and deep emotional connection; the narrative develops thoroughly around the internal lives of the characters and their relationships.

🎬 Film Information

• Title: Anne+: The Film (2021)
• Director: Valerie Bisscheroux
• Screenplay: Maud Wiemeijer
• Original Work: Dutch drama series Anne+
• Country: Netherlands
• Genre: Drama, Romance
• Running Time: 94 minutes
• Platform: Netflix
• Cast: Hanna van Vliet, Jouman Fattal, Thorn Roos de Vries

📖 Anne+: The Film, A Self Lost Between the Loss of Identity and New Attraction [No Spoilers]

Anne, who has been sharing a stable life in Amsterdam with her long-term partner Sara, faces a major shift. As Sara secures a job and relocates to Montreal, Canada, Anne promises to follow her a few months later, and for the interim, they agree to an open relationship that acknowledges each other’s freedom. However, when her first novel manuscript receives harsh criticism from a publisher for being directionless and scattered, Anne’s inner world begins to collapse.

Following Sara’s departure, news of her flirting with another woman in Montreal brings Anne uncontrollable jealousy and anxiety. In the midst of this confusion, Anne attends a drag show where she feels a powerful attraction to Lou, a non-binary drag king. Through meeting Lou, she encounters new perspectives on gender, sexuality, and an authentic life, bringing her face-to-face with her own intimate desires.

🏳️‍🌈 Relationship Structure and the Mise-en-Scène of the Queer Community in Anne+: The Film

🔗 Open Relationship: An Agreed-Upon Anxiety and the Silence of Communication

The open relationship between Anne and Sara depicted in the film purports a modern freedom, but in reality, it functions as a defense mechanism to conceal their true feelings. This form of relationship, chosen while deferring an authentic confession of not wanting to leave for Canada, hides a deep sense of alienation beneath a superficial agreement not to lose one another.

Anne’s psychological rupture as she struggles to respect Sara’s freedom precisely illustrates the vulnerability of relationships faced by the modern millennial generation. Ultimately, the silence born from a lack of communication fails to narrow the emotional distance between the two, becoming the catalyst that shakes a self that sought to settle into a familiar relationship dynamic.

🔮 Meeting Lou: Boundary-Blurring Gender Performance and Self-Acceptance

Met at the center of Amsterdam’s vibrant LGBTQ+ community, Lou is a figure who breaks the limitations of a fixed identity for Anne. Asserting their authenticity confidently as a non-binary individual, Lou’s existence creates a massive ripple effect in Anne’s creative foundation and attitude toward life, both of which had lost direction due to the publisher’s harsh critique.

The deep emotional and physical connection shared with Lou is not mere infidelity, but an expansion of the self. The energy of the community, which subverts social standards through gender performance, becomes a mirror that forces Anne to escape the passivity of the protagonist in her novel (which is to say, herself) tailored to the expectations of others, and to listen to her genuine inner voice.

🔎 Reinterpretation of the Ending — The Restoration of Autonomy Brought by Complete Independence

The ending of this film signals a complete emotional rupture from her familiar partner, Sara, while simultaneously concluding with a shot of Anne planting her feet fully within the space of Amsterdam. While this conclusion leaves an irreversible, permanent fracture in the couple’s long-standing relationship, it simultaneously gifts Anne as an individual a complete consolidation of the self.

Rejecting the typical union of a romantic comedy, this ending achieves an aesthetic of lingering resonance that shifts the axis of a life that had depended on another back onto oneself. Anne has lost the stable shelter of Sara, but in return, she has gained the dignity to author her own story and her autonomous growth as a writer.

By discarding a narrative bound to another, the narrative of a complete individual finally begins. The film allows us to imagine her life after the conclusion, autonomously editing her first book alongside her friends in Amsterdam, proving that standing alone is never isolation, but the expansion of a new world.

💬 Anne+: The Film: The Repetitiveness of Queer Narratives and the Method of Liberation

Q. How should we interpret the criticism that the protagonist’s wandering and her jealousy within the open relationship seem somewhat selfish or difficult to empathize with?

A. Some viewers may feel fatigued by the process in which Anne, unable to overcome her jealousy despite the agreed-upon rules, forms a new relationship with Lou. While the point of criticism stems from the character’s inconsistent attitude, this is rather the result of capturing the character’s imperfections with extreme realism. The film does not idealize open relationships; it structurally demonstrates how theoretical agreements collapse in the face of an actual vortex of emotion.

The character’s selfish wandering represents an immature stage in the process of searching for the self, rawly showing that a queer woman’s life is also a continuous series of trial and error rather than a perfect correct answer. Rather than evaluating this wandering through a simple moral lens, readers will be able to view it as an inevitable growing pain an individual undergoes to acquire autonomy.

✨ Anne+: The Film, A Declaration of Autonomy to Edit the Trajectory of My Own Life

The conclusion of this film does not merely stop at showing the breakup of a couple; it poses the question of “what true independence is” to the millennial generation living in modern society. We often compromise ourselves to fit within relationships with others or within the stable frameworks defined by society, mistaking that for happiness.

Through the solidarity and self-exploration of the queer community, the film structurally paradoxes that a life subordinate to another’s narrative is bound to remain incomplete. True growth arrives only when one faces desires and identity without compromise. The narrative that is most uniquely one’s own is completed when one stops turning the pages of someone else’s book and begins writing the first sentence with one’s own hand.

💌 Where are the coordinates of your life pointing right now?

We sometimes ignore our genuine inner voices to protect precious relationships. Between a safe settlement where you lose yourself despite familiarity, and a lonely independence where you can find your complete self despite anxiety—which side do you stand on? Please share the story of your current wavering in the comments.

🎬 Violet Screen’s Recommended Curation

Introducing other narratives of women who deviate from familiar orbits to construct their own worlds.

• <환희를 기다리며> (Waiting for the Delight, 2025)
  • Reason for Recommendation: An indie gem that received critical attention in the feature film category at the Korea Queer Film Festival. It follows the encounter between Hwan-hee, who works late at night as a cleaning laborer at a university, and Gyeo-wool, a dance student who stays awake alone in a practice room. It depicts the process in which the two women share an isolated and marginalized space called the janitorial rest area, filling each other’s deficiencies through the sensory language of “dance.”
• Des Preuves d’Amour (2025)
  • Reason for Recommendation: A French independent film highly acclaimed at major European queer film festivals, including Amsterdam’s Roze Filmdagen. It portrays the story of Nadia, a same-sex partner intending to give birth to a child, and Céline, who stays by her side. Through the perspective of Céline—the non-childbearing partner who lacks biological motherhood—the film illuminates the absurd bureaucratic wall of having to collect 15 recommendation letters from people around them to legally prove she is a “mother.”