If New Year’s Eve is a time for new beginnings, the end of love is a time for mourning what could’ve been. It’s a time for inventories and autopsies which bring up memories that bruise, elate, and haunt our past and present hearts. Jakob Rørvik’s Nothing Ever Really Ends is a raw and heartfelt portrait of a toxic relationship, which can’t quite be extinguished. The 24 min short puts its audience in close, sometimes stifling proximity and warns with minimal embellishment and absolute honesty of the terrible fragility of love.

Marius and Ebba have been together for years. They know each other inside out. They also know they need to break up, they just can’t quite do it. Seen over the course of three consecutive New Year’s Eves, the young couple split up and make up repeatedly, their passionate and hurtful relationship unravelling at the seams. Jakob Rørvik marries humour with sorrow, love with spite, making Nothing Ever Really Ends uncomfortably convincing and impossible to forget.

When Rørvik found himself on a plane, sitting next to actor Arthur Berning, he couldn’t have predicted that it would lead to him playing Marius in this short. “He was a little scared of flying, so we ordered a few beers to alleviate that and just had a laid-back, amusing chat about stuff we find difficult in life. I saw a more thoughtful and odd side to him that I haven’t really seen explored in his other films and I decided I wanted to write something specifically for him.” – Rørvik recalls. He had always wanted to make a film about relationships, but refused to recreate the linear trajectory they usually follow – a couple face a conflict, they overcome it and live happily ever after. “This could be a story – told through time – dealing with the challenges we never truly overcome, but that we have to figure out over and over again to save our love life” – he explains.

Relationships are all about people revealing themselves to one another in the hope that what they find will make them compatible and bring them closer. But when two people become so close, it’s often harder to separate than it is to stay together. Rørvik explores this with remarkable credibility, by making Marius and Ebba so believable as a couple, it’s hard to imagine they are not, at this very moment, preparing for this year’s New Year’s Eve party in their apartment. The chemistry between the characters is absolutely explosive, making their passion as wholly convincing as their contempt for each other. Even the flashbacks in the film feel organic rather than overly sentimental, but what I love about Nothing Ever Really Ends centres on one scene in particular. It’s the scene where Ebba is watching videos of her and Marius on her laptop. Seeing all the happy memories they’ve collected over the years, played back to back, and comparing those to their present, full of resentment and despair, is so utterly heartbreaking—it’s what makes this love story so painfully real. Rørvik is currently developing a TV-series and two features, which he has written. He is also working on a new short, which he’ll be shooting in May, and we’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for it!