Jeppe Rønde’s gripping drama Acts of Love comes to streaming courtesy of Breaking Glass Pictures after a brief run in select theaters. Featuring Cecilie Lassen and Jonas Holst Schmidt as a sister and brother with shared childhood trauma who find themselves at odds, and yet unable to escape one another’s gravitational pull, the film offers a challenging look at the space where religion and psychology meet, and were community verges on cult.

(Hanna (Lassen) has sought refuge with a church-centered community in the Danish countryside for more than seven years. In all that time she has avoided contact with her younger brother, Jakob (Schmidt), despite his efforts to reach out to her. Finally, responding to an ad from the commune, Jakob arrives with a promise to help rebuild the church’s nave and turn it into a space for new mothers. As it happens, a new mother is what Hanna hopes one day to be; the men of the commune participate in her efforts to conceive under the rubric of mutual support. This is not so surprising considering that the men and women of the community engage in communal bathing; the physical and the spiritual are, evidently, not subject to division.

This brand of neighborly love is part and parcel of the dogma espoused by the leader of the commune, Kirsten (Ann Eleonora Jørgensen), a psychologist who oversees trauma therapy sessions that can sometimes resemble charismatic faith healing ceremonies but more often take the form of “mirroring,” a kind of reconstruction of damaging events from the past. Miracles can be summoned and memories recovered through these mirroring efforts… at least, that’s the group’s belief; after seeing Hanna undergo a mirroring, a doubtful Jakob suggests that any recollections of the past could be fabricated. But when Jakob undergoes a mirroring with Hanna in which they relive their father’s funeral, it opens a door in his heart and mind. The question now becomes what he will find if he ventures further into forgotten places and painful loss — and what suppressed and hidden desires might find their way out.

The film treats the siblings with compassion, and their trauma with delicacy but, also, courage. As the two sort through their psychic wounds, the entire community is thrown into turmoil and their most sacred precepts might not be enough to restore their faith and tranquility.

There’s a mythic quality to the film, largely thanks to Rønde’s direction and Sune Kølster’s atmospheric, almost celestial, score. The traditional myths of some of the commune’s Inuit members play a subtle but defining role, particularly an origin story about the sun and the moon. But the most resonant aspects of the movie — which offers many nested layers — may be the ones that set individuals against, and within, social hierarchies. How are we to understand ourselves if not in relation to one another? What laws and dictates supersede which other ones? Are we truly all, ultimately, alone? In Lassen and Schmidt’s understated, powerful performances, there might be answers… or, perhaps, simply questions that won’t soon leave your mind.

“Acts of Love” is streaming now.