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‘The Love That Remains’ Review: Hlynur Pálmason’s Exquisitely Tender, Increasingly Haywire Portrait of a Family in Limbo
An artist juggles the strains of work, motherhood and a husband who just won't let go in Hlynur Pálmason's 'The Love That Remains.'
Though very different in form and focus from the director’s 2022 stunner “Godland,” the new film shares with its predecessor an airy, understated precision of image, a fixation with the changeable moods of the rural Icelandic landscape and a dry, peculiar wit rooted in perverse curiosities of human behavior. Loosely arranged over the course of a year, Pálmason’s script is mostly built from assorted vignettes of family activity both placid and discordant: mealtimes that are sometimes chatty and sometimes tense, a balmy afternoon picnic in which a casual glimpse up his wife’s skirt sends Magnus into an erotic reverie, a frenzied trip to the emergency room after a parent’s-worst-nightmare mishap. Editor Julius Krebs Damsbo’s inventive, angular cutting evokes the sometimes aggressively polarized energies of a day’s parenting, and Pálmason’s own 35mm lensing, while often soft and crepuscular, is attentive to how shifts in weather and scenery can impact a character’s mood — or reflect it, as the film drifts away from strict realism.
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