The Love that Remains

Icelandic filmmaker Hylnur Palmason captures a year in the life of a family as the parents navigate their separation. With its dreamy piano score, fantasy visions and quirky sequences alongside dead-serious scenes of emotional pain, its intriguing yet unsettling comic tone marks it out from other divorce stories.

The intimate vignettes and strange occurrences the film explores reveal the complexities of family, love, and the impact of shared memories.

Anna (Garðarsdóttir) is a sculptor and visual artist whose métier is decomposition and decay; her husband, Magnús (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 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, 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?

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