It’s difficult to describe the dreamy effect of Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason’s films, because they so gracefully, almost subconsciously blend the beats of everyday life with touches of the unexplainable. His characters are often dwarfed by nature, which sometimes mirrors their complicated desires and other times seems to mock them.
Pálmason’s fourth feature, The Love That Remains, is another of his fine-edged dramas that begins as a quotidian study of a family under duress and then strangely, thrillingly reveals a surreal streak. There are moments when the movie veers into fantasy, absurdism and unexpected violence, and entire sequences make us feel like we’ve plunged into the characters’ dreams.
The movie opens inside an abandoned house that’s being demolished, its roof ripped off by an excavator. It’s a metaphor for the family at the center of the story, who we first see around the table at dinner. It’s a scene right out of a sitcom, with the characters introduced in individual, smiling close-ups while the actors’ names appear on screen.
The mother, Anna, is an artist whose pieces involve metal, canvas and rust. The father, Magnús, works on a fishing boat, often at sea for days at a time. They have three children and a dog, whom they’ve raised in an idyllic farmhouse surrounded by sparkling lakes, mountains and glaciers.
Before the movie has begun, Anna and Magnús’s marriage has fallen apart. We don’t entirely know why. He’s still enamored of her while she rejects his advances, although she clearly wants him to be part of their kids’ lives. The seasons change around them; the blinding sun of endless Icelandic summers gives way to the frigid waters and bitter fog of winter. The film settles into a gentle, pastoral rhythm, but there are quietly unsettling things at its edges.
Pálmason’s previous films include 2019’s A White, White Day, about an off-duty cop’s downward spiral when he discovers his late wife was unfaithful, and 2022’s Godland, about a Danish priest losing his sanity as he builds a church in 19th-century Iceland. Like Werner Herzog, Pálmason understands that the natural order of the world can be funny, frustrating, unfulfilling and altogether impossible to pin down: the universe can just as easily deliver karmic justice as random, unearned punishment.
This is also a movie about the hubris and thinly disguised rage of men: There’s a weird episode involving a visiting art curator, who comes to see Anna’s work but is blinded by his own interests, and another in which Magnús takes his frustrations out on the family’s rooster. Magnús’s twin sons, who are probably 11 or 12, are picking up on this, firing arrows into a lifesize dummy that, in one of many flights of fancy in the film, eventually decides it no longer wants to be a punching bag for this family’s problems.
I’ve tried my best to explain the singular tone of The Love That Remains, but I think I’m still coming up short. It’s frank, complicated, bizarre, disquieting and intriguingly elliptical. I treasure the experience of watching a movie and feeling the growing realization that it could go anywhere and become anything it wants to be. This movie gave me that.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on SPR News.