When Danish filmmaker Ole Bornedal sat down to make Just Another Love Story, he began with what many consider the very last step of the process. “It was the idea of the poster that actually was the first idea that started this film,” he said. “I saw a poster in front of me of a very tormented man looking at the audience with a lot of blood on his face, and then I saw a title under this poster saying Just Another Love Story. And I thought it was ironical and could be a fun poster to make. But at the end of the day, the poster didn’t turn out like that.”

Still, all of the twisted irony of this first moment of inspiration found ample expression in Bornedal’s film, a noir thriller about a crime scene photographer named Jonas (Anders W. Berthelsen) who is rear-ended by a free-spirited heiress (Rebecka Hemse). The car accident leaves her a blind amnesiac and him wracked with guilt, and he doesn’t correct her or her family when they mistake him for her mysterious boyfriend Sebastian (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), who lives in Hanoi. As Jonas becomes increasingly drawn into this fake identity, he begins to drift away from his wife and two children.

“You have a stressful nine-to-five job, you’re sitting in your car, waiting in line, and you have to pick up your screaming kids, and so on and so on and so on,” said Bornedal. “Who wouldn’t dream of just having the free path of becoming someone else? Just for a day, just for a week, just for a month. Perhaps, in some serious cases, for a whole life.”

Born in a small town in Denmark, Bornedal decided at age 14 that he wanted to become a filmmaker after seeing Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up. Even though Bornedal was rejected by Denmark’s public film school at age 20, he began directing for radio and television before making the internationally acclaimed morgue thriller Nightwatch in 1994, which he remade in English for Miramax in 1997. During the next decade, he only made one film, I Am Dina, while working as a writer and director for theatre. But this year he has returned to the silver screen with a furor, releasing two movies that reached No. 1 in Denmark this year: Just Another Love Story and the children’s horror comedy The Substitute, which Sam Raimi is remaking for U.S. audiences.

The characters in Nightwatch and Just Another Love Story tend to spend more than their fair share of time in morgues, but Bornedal explained that he’s “not a necrophiliac or anything like that.” There’s simply something fascinating about people who work with the dead.

“It just kind of sets your own life into perspective,” he said. “When you work with a job like that, you’ve got to ask yourself the question: What am I doing here on this planet? And at the end of the day, making these thrillers like I do, I guess that’s the same question I want to ask the audience when they look at my pictures and see that death and that consequence of not breathing anymore. Am I happy? And is this life good enough, or should I go out and change it somehow?”