The Love that Remains: a family breakdown is treated with a light tragicomic touch in Hlynur Pálmason’s impressive directorial balancing act

Tolstoy’s often-invoked quote about families and their feelings gets turned inside-out in The Love That Remains. The Icelandic clan at the centre of Hlynur Pálmason’s curious and unsettling domestic drama isn’t like any other household, but whether they’re happy or unhappy in their own way is a matter of perspective. There’s a difference between movies that wear their enigmas on their sleeves, as modernist hand-me-downs, and ones where the ambiguity has been infused under skin, on a molecular level. Pálmason – a skilful, consistent filmmaker steadily approaching master status – slices scalpel-like through the contradictions of marriage, sex and parenthood, at first barely breaking the skin, and then drawing out a steady spray of something thicker than water.

Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) is a sculptor and visual artist whose métier is decomposition and decay; her husband, Magnús (Sverrir Gudnason), is a fisherman assigned to an industrial trawler that traverses its frigid routes for weeks at a time. As the film opens, the pair seem resigned to their ships-in-the-night routine, but gradually, it becomes clear that this isn’t a completely copacetic arrangement. The reason Magnús acts like a guest in his own home – and a bit awkwardly around his three children – is that he doesn’t really live there any more. Rather, he’s doggedly playing his role in a separation so strategically relaxed and amicable as to seem invisible, although anyone who’s ever experienced a hairline fracture knows how easily and painfully the cracks can deepen. While Anna plunges headlong into work and household responsibilities – cleaving the kids that much closer to her in the process – Magnús seethes politely in semi-exile. Nobody is making him the bad guy, exactly, but he doesn’t exactly feel good about himself either. The question: is it better to be explicitly persona non grata with the ones you love, or to hover on the margins in perpetuity, like a ghost, for lack of anybody else to haunt?

As in his 19th-century epic Godland (2022) – a visually stunning movie foregrounding themes of faith and religious devotion – Pálmason works to give The Love That Remains a metaphysical dimension. The film is smaller than its predecessor, but similarly spacious, especially as it drifts from a strictly realistic register towards the shoals of subjective psychodrama. Anna and Magnús may be at an impasse, but their inner lives are dynamic and decisive. When she imagines an obnoxious Swedish colleague crashing and burning midway through his flight home, it’s a sight gag dredged up out of a resentful, even murderous subconscious. Intriguingly – and troublingly – Pálmason declines to explicitly bracket off his characters’ fantasies, so that every scene feels susceptible to some kind of surreal intrusion. The effect is double-edged: it renders certain hallucinations scarily (and hilariously) matter of fact while casting doubt on the veracity of genuine crises, including a terrifying leisure-time accident that suggests nothing so much as slapstick Michael Haneke.

It may be that it’s too easy – and reductive – to put Pálmason in the context of austerity-mongers like Haneke or Ruben Östlund, whose breakthrough Force Majeure (2014) does feel like an influence. It’s hopefully a compliment to note that, formally and tonally, his films belong in their company (and that his funny games are actually funny). The Love That Remains is exquisitely made in ways that do and don’t call attention to themselves, starting with the performances, which eschew anything like straining or preening; there’s none of the actorly pyrotechnics of a movie like Anatomy of a Fall (2023), for instance. 

The Scandinavian drabness of the locations – outdoor landscapes and interiors spaces – gets stratified by subtle, disarming shifts in light and visibility. The editing rhythms are unpredictable, languorously drawing out moments of aimless downtime while brutally curtailing other, ostensibly more crucial plot details. It’s rare to watch a movie that’s so simultaneously confident and discombobulating, and which doesn’t overplay its metaphors even as it deploys them briskly and without hesitation. (Best in show: an oversexed, rogue rooster whose vicious tendencies come home to, well, roost.) Treating heavy subject matter with a light touch – without depressurising it or trivialising it, or tipping over into insufferable, festival-ready quirkiness – is no mean feat, and The Love That Remains is, finally, a triumph of the cinema of equilibrium. Its frightening, hilarious final image suggests a state of anxious suspension commensurate with Pálmason’s own marvellous directorial balancing act.

 ► The Love that Remains  is in UK cinemas 13 March.