Hlynur Pálmason’s fourth feature marks a soft, Malickian left turn for the man behind the icy-bleak dramas Winter Brothers, A White, White Day, and Godland. Up against the rest of Pálmason’s oeuvre––which weighs viewers down with a grave obstinance, whether emanating from the conflict between brothers, a perceived affair, or a suicidally zealous resolve to evangelize to the least habitable (or interested) corners of the Earth––The Love That Remains is a floating catharsis of love and loss that carries its audience like a cloud carries angels.
Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) is an Icelandic Sally Mann of sorts, in her rural lifestyle and natural approach to her work living equally off art and land––modern and ancient tradition––in the countryside with her husband Magnús (Sverrir Gudnason), three kids, and dog Panda (who took home the Palm Dog at Cannes in May). But the matriarchs’ arts are disparate. Where Mann photographed and screen-printed a haunting southern Gothic in silvery black-and-white, Anna uses iron, wood, and the fission and erosion of the seasons to make her rust and raw material art.
Their life on the cliffs and coastlines of Iceland isn’t a quirky Captain Fantastic kind of roughin’ it––with extremist rules and a scrappy charge for lifelong boycott––but a genuine, enticing mode of being, one that seems healthier, in-tune with nature, and more connected than most. Yet at the center of the Icelandic writer-director-cinematographer’s contemplative gem sits evidence of the opposite: separation. Pálmason refuses to render a life unrealistic, so in the wake of what seems perfection, he depicts the painful dissolution of Anna and Magnus’s partnership.
What unfolds is a tender, impressionistic investigation into the collective soul of a common family with an uncommon ontology. They speak to each other differently than many would be comfortable with, mom and kids having comically vulgar casual conversations about which chickens are “whores” and how animals go about “fucking.” A cut from a baby chick to a grilled chicken wing soon after encapsulates the mild dark humor that runs throughout.
There’s hardly a minute to catch your breath from the pervasive pleasantries. If the image isn’t quietly captivating, the character(s) in it are. When the emotionally transparent dialogue dissolves away for a while, the hushed ASMR sound design takes over. In the most transfixing moments, Harry Hunt’s heavy-breathing, impossibly gentle piano score––periodically dueted with low, wheezing wind instruments––fills the soundscape with a delicate warmth and silken light, like a nesting hymn for a paradisal summer that seems to somehow contain all seasons in approachable beauty.
The screenplay is overflowing with memorable meditations, blunt-but-heartfelt exchanges, and piercing affection for its people, all rooted in the natural world around them. The couple’s bittersweet separation plays out over a year through curated moments and hypnotic visual concepts, like the crane-operated removal of a roof from a studio, the reveal of sunbaked iron art that’s been gestating out in the cold for several months, or split-screen home movies that chronicle a chicken from birth to death.
Some are simply there to behold, courtesy of Pálmason’s sixth sense for framing and layered depth in the near-square Academy ratio. Others have a clear-cut narrative bent. Take, for instance, the cherry on top of a bizarre art curator’s visit, in which the obnoxious phony, just before boarding a two-passenger plane, reveals he stole a goose egg against Anna’s advice, holding his finger to his mouth in a sinister hush pose as the propeller blows menacingly behind him, Pálmason’s incisive commentary on the powerbrokers of the highly subjective art realm embedded within the beat.
In the film’s most satisfying visual experiment (apologies to the river of infinite fish, a close second)––and the only one that earned its own spin-off feature, Joan of Arc, soon to come––we watch a scarecrow knight, erected by the kids in a ditch on the side of a cliff for target practice, receive arrow after arrow to its armor, the camera fixed in the same spot as the seasons evolve in an exponentially warping timelapse around it. With each new arrow, the shot cuts to another day, week, month, until we’ve gone from the clear-eyed colors of summer to the deadening whites of winter and back again. It knocks Zemeckis’ Here concept out of the park in one indelible experiment.
A painstakingly crafted picture that oozes meticulous consideration in every detail, The Love That Remains follows in the footsteps of Pálmason’s pictures to date in construction. We catch a glimpse of his approach in the processes of Anna. She spends months, if not years, creating her pieces, relying on the elements, considering and critically reconsidering along the way.
When it comes to writing, directing, and shooting his films, Pálmason is the same, leading long-considered, intimately crewed, personally DP’d shoots intermittently that lean heavily on the whims of nature and his local community. He shoots with the 35mm film camera he owns, which he procured in order to piece his projects together over long periods of time without needing to rent and re-rent gear when inspiration strikes.
The processes depicted herein aren’t the only elements specific to the do-it-all filmmaker. Locations, houses, cars, cast, crew, problems the characters face––many of them are pulled directly from Pálmason’s world. To drive the point home: Anna’s three kids are Pálmason’s real-life children. Are they passionate about acting? No. But they do it for him, and, of course, the money, he says.
Editor Julius Krebs Damsbo’s pacing is immaculate, making for a flow that, in tandem with the score and sound design, is all too engrossing to grasp time during. It leaves viewers in a blissful state of levitation––even among melancholic moments––until it’s unfortunately over. Pálmason stretches to mountainous heights in screenwriting and cinematography, but it’s the direction––the poetic and ironclad unity across departments––that ultimately lends the film its hypnotic flow, the lyrical rush and hush that earns a comparison to Malick where most only aim for it.
The Love That Remains occupies the rarified air of a movie that has it all: heartwarming joy, heartwrenching pain, comedy that charms so invasively it gives chills of envy, meditation, action, all shapes and sizes of duration and composition. It’s like a life fully lived—Pálmason’s best film yet.
The Love That Remains screened at the 63rd New York Film Festival and will be released in 2026 by Janus Films, following a 2025 awards-qualifying run.