"The Love That Remains," the new film from Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason, has been awarded four out of five stars by critic Sergi Sánchez, who called it a notable and disconcerting attempt to capture what is left once a relationship has fallen apart.
The film opens with the roof of what looks like an abandoned hangar being pulled away, the building dismantled as though a box of thunder were being uncovered, leaving love exposed to the open air, at the mercy of rain and wind. Sánchez wrote that Pálmason's film tries to film what remains in that hangar, the wreckage of a shipwreck, also embodied in a scarecrow, half pagan totem, half conceptual statue, that stands battered by Icelandic weather as a silent witness to the passing seasons. That figure works as a thread stitching together the film's vignettes, part naturalistic, part dreamlike, which together tell the story of a romantic breakup.
An elusive portrait of divorce
Sánchez described "The Love That Remains" as elusive and evasive as a divorce film, with a structure that is deliberately disjointed. He wrote that Pálmason seems to be thinking of the film as a tragicomic strip of self-contained sequences, a device similar to, though more realistic than, the cinema of Swedish director Roy Andersson.
The film follows the separate lives of a visual artist and her children, and her ex-husband, a sailor, with each character identified with an element: earth and its rust for her, water and its currents for him. Their paths pull together and apart through impulses of attraction and rejection, Sánchez wrote, like a ball of yarn batted around by a clumsy cat.
A deeply personal project
Pálmason, who is also a visual artist, shot the film at his own house, and the children who appear in it are his own, according to the review. Sánchez noted that the director at times seems close to losing himself in the mix of tones, though the film's melancholic score serves as a kind of tonal mortar holding it together.
The review said the film references the 1954 monster movie known in Spanish as "La mujer y el monstruo" ("Creature from the Black Lagoon"), takes aim at pretentious gallery owners, needles mischievous children and still believes in surrealist gestures of love. Sánchez contrasted it with Pálmason's previous film, "Godland," which he described as severe, saying "The Love That Remains" feels ethereal, light and volatile by comparison.
Cast and production details
The film stars Sverrir Gudnason, Saga Gardarsdóttir, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir and Grímur Hlynsson. It is a 109-minute Icelandic-Danish-Swedish-French co-production from 2025, billed as a comedy-drama, written and directed by Pálmason.
Sánchez praised the film's sense of creative freedom and the inventive spin it gives to divorce-themed cinema. His main criticism was that the film's episodic nature forces a mix of tonal registers that often feels disconcerting.
