Cast Away
By Michael Koresky

New York Film Festival 2025:
The Love That Remains
Dir. Hlynur Pálmason, Iceland, Janus Films

Let’s start with the music. With its prismatic approach to narrative and mercurial, at times withholding, way of planting its emotional stakes, one can easily imagine Hlynur Pálmason’s The Love That Remains opting for no score. There’s a detachment to the Icelandic filmmaker’s often locked-down images that may have naturally lent itself to a more practiced European art-film austerity. Yet Pálmason chooses to affectionately welcome the viewer into his carefully constructed world rather than keep us at a distance. The first indication is his plentiful use of tracks from UK recording artist Harry Hunt’s album “Playing Piano for Dad,” the warm, jazz-inflected melancholy of which is dusted over much of the film like freshly fallen snow. Outside the context of the film, the piano score might sound like the accompaniment for a toasty night by the fireside. Yet Hunt’s minor chords and capricious melodies allow the film a gracious domesticity that works in contrast to its swollen, poignant portrait of disintegration.

Working with a smaller scope than in his previous feature, the 19th-century settlement epic Godland, Pálmason nevertheless finds similarly surprising ways to disassemble and reconstitute the building blocks of an expected cinematic grammar. The Love That Remains is, broadly, a story of divorce and its effect on a family. Yet within this general framework, Pálmason avoids all generic touchstones or easy emotional beats—there’s no speechifying, no real catharsis, or even much in the way of forthright agony. Instead, he alights upon moments of comfort and discouragement, ease and rupture, as variable as the changing seasons, set against a gloomy-gorgeous bucolic landscape captured with natural light. It’s here, against the yellowing green grasses and overcast skies, that our family persists, trying to move on from the recent separation of Anna (Saga Garoarsdóttir), a visual artist, and Magnús (Sverrir Guonason), a fisherman. It’s dad who has moved out of the family home, likely a capitulation against his wishes, leaving the bulk of the household work and child-rearing to Anna. Their teen daughter (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir) and adolescent sons (Grímur Hlynsson and Porgils Hlynsson) are played by the director’s three kids, who give their casual interactions a gratifying, unmannered presence, while their good-natured Icelandic sheepdog Panda scurries around their property.

Initially, it’s unclear that this is a disrupted unit at all. Pálmason introduces us to the family in a series of close-ups around the dining table, cheerily sunlit, the names of the actors appearing on-screen in chipper lower thirds. Yet we might notice that Magnús asks if he’s interrupting before he sits down, an odd formality for a father in his own home. We soon realize that things are in serious disrepair. This is, after all, a film that begins with the image of a house’s roof removed from its edifice in one clean yank. After dinner, Magnús looks forlornly through the warmly lit kitchen windows of the home as he drives off before returning to his tiny, windowless room deep in the hold of his fishing vessel. The contrasts between the different spaces now inhabited by husband and wife come to define the overall tenor and mood of The Love That Remains, in ways literal and not. For Anna, art is labor, and there is no clear distinction in effort between what she does and Magnús’s machine-heavy work aboard his rig. While Anna attempts to expand her artmaking into a more viable business model, hoping to find a larger workspace, Magnús finds his world irrevocably shrinking. These contrasting and complementary forces of creation and destruction are set against a lush but terse natural landscape that can envelop its characters as easy as it can shrug them off with indifference. Meanwhile, the kids just act like kids, internalizing whatever anxieties of resentments they may harbor.

Rarely do outsiders penetrate the emotional environs of the family’s life, which makes it all the more memorable when a visiting Swedish gallerist (Anders Mossling) intrudes upon Anna’s world. In need of an exhibition space for her latest art—prints created, aptly, via a process of deterioration, with rusting metal on large white canvases—Anna initially welcomes this blowhard, but it soon becomes clear that he has little interest in her work outside of the novelty of the Icelandic landscape in which she makes them. “Very earthy, very nature,” he says of her work, though he’d rather prattle on during an interminable lunch extolling the health benefits of drinking a bottle of wine a day—and bemoan the PC police for not allowing the medical community to tell this truth. At the end of the day, before he mounts a tiny plane back to the continent, he tells Anna matter-of-factly that he has no room in his gallery. One final insult: he’s cradling a goose egg, stolen from Anna’s flock, in his hands, which he brandishes with a conspiratorial smile, captured by Pálmason in diabolical slow-motion—the gatekeeper as a grotesque, mischievous imp.

Pálmason seems to take enormous pleasure in showing us familiar things in unfamiliar ways: domestic dramas are a dime a dozen, yet it’s unlikely you’ve seen—or felt—one quite like this. Pálmason’s instincts for composition, cutting, and the shaping of cinematic space are constantly unusual without ever seeming willfully idiosyncratic. His film is firmly situated within the shifting, temperamental terrain of his country, and it often feels as though nothing less than the weather itself is dictating its emotional terms. Every element is slightly askew while also being all of a piece with every other. When the camera pans abruptly to catch Panda in the throes of ecstatic itching, it feels as essential to the film’s essence as the lovely interlude charting the life cycles of the family’s chickens or the montage of foraged mushrooms, their delicate, fleshy interiors served up for our delectation. Jarring moments of violent rupture are as intrinsically woven into the tapestry, whether emanating from nightmares or waking life. At one point, Anna, after having kicked Magnús out of the house following the respite of a tender family outing, face-plants onto the hard wood floor, though Pálmason’s scalpel-precise editor Julius Krebs Damsbo cuts at the moment of impact. A similar cut occurs later when Magnús has been tasked with killing a maniac rooster that’s been wreaking havoc; rather than use an axe, he fells the bird with a heavy rock. We may not witness the impact, but the desperation of the act—and the father’s need to maintain control over his domain—is even more felt within the abrupt cutaway.

There are no big moments in The Love That Remains, but everything feels looming and infinite. If its fluid succession of grace notes never feel quaint, it’s perhaps because Pálmason—who also shot the film himself on 35mm—seems to be working on a subconscious rather than literal level, drifting ever so gradually from the concrete to something more like a dreamscape, pushing towards the purely psychological. Throughout, Pálmason recurringly cuts away to a cliffside promontory where the kids have set up a dummy knight for archery practice. As the film continues, the figure of the knight will have both metaphorical meaning and literal narrative consequence, though in Pálmason’s hands what could have been a series of whimsical cutaways blossom into something more powerful. It might initially seem as though the knight, increasingly pierced with arrows like Saint Sebastian, stands in for the errant patriarch, but Pálmason reveals that he doesn’t traffic in such easy symbolism. There are no simple sacrifices here, just the gradual acceptance that life can sometimes cast you adrift and that it’s never easy to find your way back to shore.