THE LOVE THAT RENAINS reviewed by Alfie Tiplady

THE LOVE THAT REMAINS sees filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason plunge into the realm of the subconscious through an intimate and strangely surreal, collage-like depiction of a family living in rural Iceland, amidst the challenges of a husband-wife relationship in turmoil.

The film begins with the image of a bisected building. Like the film’s central couple, the roof’s separation has taken place off-screen; now, lifted by a crane, it hangs precariously above the structure’s exposed walls, wobblingly uncertain. Pálmason’s film is not concerned with messy melodrama; there is no painful breakdown in relations shown between Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason). Instead we are introduced to a relationship, though loosely cordial, now having lost its romantic spark. The central concern for the ex-couple, and of the film, is how they navigate this fractured relationship whilst semi-cooperatively raising their two sons and older teenage daughter - a responsibility made knottier by artist Anna’s creative and financial frustrations, and commercial fisherman Magnús’ socially influenced feelings of emasculation.

THE LOVE THAT REMAINS is at once Pálmason’s most intimately personal and his most impressionistic film. Far less narratively streamlined than his foggy revenge thriller A White, White Day (2019), or 19th century religio-colonial critique Godland (2022), the film is foremost a loose series of vignette-like depictions of a family's day-to-day activities, set in the alien landscapes of his native Iceland. When the family is together there are quiet scenes of hillside picnicking, foraging and evening meals. There is a hyperrealistic feel to the family conversations, particularly in the exchanges between the children. (The three children are played by Pálmason’s real-life kids). The languid realism of these scenes is never sustained, though, with consistent intercutting to elemental and often destructive closeups - a mushroom being sliced from its stem, foraged berries being blitzed in a blender. 

Magnús’s life away from the family is a solitary one. He spends his days working on a fishing trawler, in an oppressively masculine environment, surrounded by grumbling co-workers, who when not fishing, sit around bemoaning the habits of modern young-people - a critique Magnús can't help but internalise about his own parental failings, felt through his fatherly absence. Anna meanwhile works in a factory and spends her time tending to the artworks she makes outside, on large canvases, through imprints left from rusting metal - there is symbolic relevance in the fact Anna takes decay and utilises it as the medium for her artistic creation, a mirroring of the greater responsibility that is imposed on her, within the broken relationship, in caring for the children. 

Around midway there is a pronounced tonal shift, begun by a surreal sequence involving an obnoxiously dismissive gallery curator, prospectively visiting Anna to view her work. To Anna’s horror, the cartoonish figure - a not so subtle dig towards art-world snobbery - gleefully steals a freshly laid goose egg in a comically shocking moment that heralds a shift towards a new fairytale-like dream logic. From then on, dreams seem to blur with the reality of the film; unforgettably in a nightmare sequence that sees Magnús neurotic feelings of inadequacy manifest themselves in the form of a giant, violent chicken. Similarly dreamlike is Pálmason’s trademark use of a time-lapse effect, which allows him to capture entire seasonal changes in the Icelandic landscape and distill them into brief sequences. The subject centred in the lapse is a scarecrow-like mannequin tied to a pole - assembled by the children - upon which they fire their bow and riddle with arrows. The scarecrow could be read, pointedly, as the physical manifestation of the absentee father’s sins, or perhaps as an ancient Icelandic pagan totem or maybe just a target-dummy - it’s all very mysterious.