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‘When the Light Breaks’ Review: A Maelstrom of Youthful Emotion Plays Out Between Two Sunsets
Two young women grieve for the same lover in 'When the Light Breaks,' a quiet but intensely felt miniature from Icelandic director Rúnar Rúnarsson.
Exhausting waves of feeling lap each other over the hours, stretching and blurring them as disbelief gives way to panic, to fatigue, to deep and paralyzing sadness, all while practical tasks mount and accelerate. In “ When the Light Breaks,” Rúnar Rúnarsson poignantly dramatizes the vastness, smallness and strangeness of one such day, following rawly bereaved art student Una (Elín Hall) through the immediate, suffocating aftermath of her lover Diddi’s sudden passing — with spiraling emotions further confused by unresolved secrets between her and the dead. Rúnarsson’s sparse script isn’t interested in engineering more seismic confrontation or catharsis, as “When the Light Breaks” instead trades in the kind of tentative realizations and ambiguities more commonly found in short-form storytelling.
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