With The Love That Remains, Hlynur Pálmason shifts gears from the icy severity of Godland and the simmering grief of A White, White Day to deliver a warm yet quietly devastating portrait of a family learning how to (co-)exist after a marriage ends. Set against Iceland’s imposing yet luminous landscapes, the film follows a separated couple and their three children across the uneasy months following their split, blending domestic realism with eccentric surrealism to capture the strange emotional limbo that follows love’s collapse. Both gently comic and deeply melancholic, the film becomes less about the breakup itself than about what persists in the wake of its dissolution: habit, tenderness, resentment, and the stubborn bonds that refuse to vanish on schedule.
Tune into Inside the Arthouse on February 4th to hear Pálmason discuss his latest work with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its debut at the Laemmle Royal and Glendale theaters beginning February 6th.
Rather than tracing a traditional narrative arc, Pálmason presents a series of vignettes that drift between everyday routine and flights of imagination. Magnus, or Maggi (Sverrir Gudnason), works long stretches aboard a fishing trawler, returning home to a family life that no longer fully includes him. His estranged wife Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir), an artist attempting to push her work into larger spaces, appears steadier but no less burdened, balancing her creative ambitions with the emotional labor of parenting children still adjusting to their new reality.
Their interactions carry an awkward familiarity: shared meals, casual conversations, lingering frustrations, and moments when their prior intimacy briefly resurfaces. But Pálmason repeatedly interrupts these naturalistic scenes with flashes of surreal humor and dreamlike invention: a monstrous rooster stalks Magnus’s nightmares, an art-world charlatan meets an exaggerated fate, and a medieval sword drops inexplicably from the sky beside the children’s play area. These moments lighten the film’s tone while also underscoring the emotional chaos lurking beneath its surface, reflecting how heartbreak rarely unfolds in tidy, realistic beats.
Shot by Pálmason himself on richly textured film stock, the Icelandic landscapes become more than mere scenic backdrops, but dynamic entities that mirror the characters’ emotional isolation while offering tantalizing glimpses of calm and continuity. Everyday play, family pets, and the rhythms of work and weather continue even as adult relationships falter.
What makes The Love That Remains so affecting is its refusal to offer easy resolution. Instead, Pálmason captures the uncomfortable truth that love does not simply disappear—It mutates, lingers, and occasionally resurfaces in unexpected forms. The result is a film that is tender, odd, and quietly profound, finding humor and grace in the messy process of learning how to live with the fractured pieces of our best-laid plans.
“There’s a deceptive sweetness to [its] simple, hypnotic rhythms.” – Clint Worthington, RogerEbert.com
“Pálmason’s fourth feature is an album of achingly felt, morbidly funny and increasingly haywire scenes from a marriage.” – Guy Lodge, Variety