When the Light Breaks: sadness simmers beneath the surface in this quietly affecting Icelandic drama

The Icelandic drama When the Light Breaks – the original, more succinct title is Ljósbrot, ‘refraction’ – is built around a simple question. How can a person deal with the loss of a loved one when circumstances demand that they hide the extent of their emotion? The quandary is especially painful when it affects someone of college age, still beginning to grapple with life’s harsher emotional challenges, even while presenting themselves as mature and unbreakably robust. Significantly, heroine Una, like her lover and short-lived new boyfriend Diddi, is studying performance art; after his death, she will have to perform a controlled, undemonstrative, indeed secretive form of grieving.

Rúnar Rúnarsson’s film squeezes the events of a single day, from sunset to sunset, into a compressed 82 minutes – one day that feels like the defining emotional drama of a lifetime. This is a film of confident dramatic pacing. It begins with a beach scene: Una and Diddi watch the sun go down over the sea, then spend the night together and discuss the new prospects of a burgeoning relationship. There follows a mysterious, eerie sequence – the lights of a traffic tunnel pass overhead, to the chilly solo voice of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s ‘Odi et Amo’ – ending in what surely qualifies as the most dramatically unexpected ‘what just happened?’ disruption of onscreen calm since the avalanche in Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (2014). What has actually happened, and how it affects the film’s characters, is not made fully explicit until 18 minutes into the film – leaving only an hour for writer-director Rúnarsson to show Una and a small group of other young people dealing with the trauma.

The circle that she spends the day with, including some friends of Diddi who she doesn’t know, do not always observe the accepted protocol of mourning – one lad gets into an angry face-off with a driver – but then, in the face of grief, anything goes. Only not for Una. All of the group, including Diddi’s longstanding hometown girlfriend Klara, express their anguish openly – but Una cannot, especially when forced to hear how Klara and Diddi were “the perfect couple”. Una’s silence arises partly from the impossibility, at such a painful time, of letting Klara know that Diddi was about to leave her – and partly, it is implied, from a sense that keeping the secret will not only preserve appearances but also honour Una’s closeness with her new lover, something shared beyond death.

Only once does Una openly articulate the complex nature of her pain: she tells one boy, who has guessed her secret, that she feels stupid about feeling jealous of Klara because people feel sympathy for her and not for Una. In a quiet, even rather taciturn film, there are only a few such moments in which emotions and thoughts are made clear in words. Another comes in an intimate, emotionally pregnant bathroom scene. Klara admits that she felt jealous that a girl had joined Diddi’s band, only to be reassured when he told her that Una was lesbian. Una corrects her, explaining that she identifies as pansexual, then pointedly adds, “My last love was a guy.”

States of being are mostly communicated visually. Rúnarsson and director of photography Sophia Olsson make imaginative use of Reykjavik landmarks. A memorial service for casualties of the accident that killed Diddi is held in the city’s Hallgrímskirkja, a huge church with distinctively shaped side wings. These are used brilliantly, if with a knowing touch of show-offery, for a scene in which Klara expresses her scepticism about performance art. Una replies by demonstrating her own signature piece, teaching people to fly: it involves a simple but, thanks to the camerawork, magical use of the building’s architecture. Another key venue, used as a Red Cross emergency centre, is the Harpa concert hall, its glass façade designed by Olafur Eliasson. In particular, it is used powerfully in a shot framing an isolated Una against one of its shard-like surfaces, prefiguring a more demonstratively tricksy use of a window, in which Una’s and Klara’s faces merge together on reflecting glass.

Throughout, inventive cinematography stresses Una’s isolation, not only from Diddi’s pals, but from an entire population affected by catastrophe – highlighting the sense that, ultimately, all grief may be experienced alone, and has an inescapable solipsistic dimension, even when a society undergoes it communally. An extended take following Una through crowds at the Red Cross centre culminates in an extreme close-up of her. Other shots – on a bus, in the street – mark her out as occupying a separate universe from the gaudily dressed revellers (Teletubbies, a human banana) celebrating school graduation: an obvious rhetorical flourish but effective, especially the second time, when the comedy of the first such image has now turned bitter.

Central to the film is the intensely restrained, delicately modulated performance of Elín Hall, a rising Icelandic actor best known as a singer. Her fragile, feathery voice on record and her low-key melodic laments are, you imagine, very different from the music that Una would listen to, or perform in her band with Diddi. Una adopts a severe tough-girl manner, with a slicked-back crop and androgynous fashion style – Hall is often photographed here to accentuate her geometric facial shape and unforgiving stare, all the better to bring out the contrasting vulnerability beneath Una’s carefully composed exterior. 

When the Light Breaks premiered last May in Cannes, as the opening film of Un Certain Regard, a section usually associated with young and/or first- and second-time directors – and one could easily assume that this was a prime specimen of 2020s young cinema. In fact, it is the fourth feature from a 48-year-old director, a festival circuit regular since his 2011 fiction debut Volcano (also about love and pain, but with a protagonist in his late sixties). Even so, Rúnarsson has sharply caught the mood of a dominant strain of Gen-Z culture, the prevailing melancholy that defines so much current pop, Hall’s own songs included. The film would also seem to reflect a reported tendency in that generation to favour stories of friendship rather than of love – something borne out here in a progression from doomed romance to a different kind of intimacy. The light we see in the sunset of the closing shot could be seen as the irrepressible light of youthful resilience, despite a wound that will surely mark these lives enduringly.

► When the Light Breaks is in UK cinemas from 23 May.