If Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason’s work has an overall motif to date, it could be summed up by lines from Joy Division’s eponymous post-punk anthem, whose chorus merely goes, “Isolation, Isolation, Isolation”. His mise-en-scène strongly betrays that his country’s population is only 350,000, its hills and horizons feeling untouched, and existing as they likely had centuries ago. Despite this notion’s connection with settlements and colonialism, its landscape also suggests a tabula rasa, bounding with potential to harness, beauty to reap, and the capability to inspire artistic creativity and love.
“Godland”, his breakout 2022 feature following an unstable Danish priest establishing a new church on the islands, exhibited the darkest variation on these ideas, with formal ballast for acres, despite a surplus of solemnity, and obvious pinches from “There Will be Blood” and Werner Herzog. He’s been touting another spectacularly ambitious movie, “On Land and Sea”, but pivoted to “The Love That Remains” as a follow-up, a more intimate project shot piecemeal over several years, referencing difficult events in his life, if stopping short of raw auto-fiction.
Premiering in the non-competitive Cannes Première section at this year’s festival, Pálmason completes a transition from maximalism to minimalism, tracking a nuclear family somewhat similar to his own as it disintegrates. His own children Ída, Grímur, and Þorgils are the fictional couple’s brood, with the female lead Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) mimicking his vocation as an artist (if with about a quarter of his international renown), and her fiancé, the dumpy, yet endearing Magnús (often shortened to Maggi, and played by Sverrir Guðnason), shipping out for weeks on a herring trawler, a place to luxuriate in photogenic vistas and calm sunlight, without promising the slightest possibility of real human intimacy. With her practice consisting of Anselm Kiefer-esque metallic land art, Anna has a disappointing visit from a Swedish gallerist, whose assessment is “not this time”; after his mini-plane’s outbound exit, she decries him as “boring”.
Pálmason is an exacting image-maker, giving us crystalline natural panoramas that apportion their beauty carefully, yet his screenplays are deliberately more fragmented, often to their detriment. In “Godland” and his Cannes Critics’ Week calling-card “A White, White Day”, this shattered sense of trajectory spiraled into hypnotic bleakness; here, he braids various fragments to relate a time-honored story of love lost, yet the immaculacy of the construction doesn’t help us feel it as viscerally as he’d like. Here, still waters run a bit shallow.
An immediate limitation is that what initiated Anna and Maggi’s breakup is so vague. They begin the film ostensibly “together”, then it’s undeniably clear the latter now lives elsewhere, although their new co-parenting arrangement sees significant, and quite bearable time spent in each others’ company. Pálmason, shooting on 35mm in Academy ratio, loves his master shots composed with roomy depth of field. Symmetry through recurrent objects entered in the frame is common, with temporal match-cuts employed to take us from day to night, or even sunlight to surrounding snow. The five family members are scattered amidst these wide compositions, with close-ups tightly rationed. In this mode, “The Love That Remains” often feels like his attempt to enshrine this era of his immediate family in stopped time — a memento — like an artsy version of the iOS Photos app slideshows that pop up in our notifications.
That analogy creates a logical segue for contemplating what’s innovative and forward-thinking about Pálmason’s work here and overall. Late in the film, he chooses to transition from one image to another with a laptop browser “flip” sound effect, and it collapses inwards like if you minimize a window on screen. This feels a bit forced and corny, and the director becomes even more outlandish depicting Maggi’s dreams as their relationship feels fully unsalvageable: a rooster disturbs him in real life, then visits him in giant, anthropomorphized form in his dream to injure him or worse. It’s a tonal shift that just about works, due to its knowing sense of contrast.
If “The Love That Remains” has a kindred spirit in contemporary auteur cinema, it evokes a far-less edgy and kooky version of Carlos Reygadas’ “Our Time” (indeed, the Mexican enfant terrible sits on the main competition jury this year). Both experiment with how to distress the marital dramas of the “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Scenes from a Marriage” vintage; one has 70s British prog rock and polyamory, with the other comparatively faltering for not exploring a more passionate or erotic direction. But Pálmason’s overall sincerity has its dividends, even for what it lacks in candidness: the poignant closing shot distills that this is his vision on this eternal topic, open to the risk that its alternating visual modes won’t harmonize. The love remains in Maggi’s heart, but can’t encompass and combine with all the love Anna, Ída, Grímur, and Þorgils respectively have kept and also eliminated.
Grade: B-
“The Love That Remains” debuted in the Cannes Première section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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