Icelandic film-maker Hlynur Pálmason gave us the haunting historical drama Godland and the challenging and bizarre thriller A White, White Day; now he has changed things up with this startling, amusing, vaguely frustrating movie. The Love That Remains is a portrait of a fractured family and a sundered marriage which, with its dreamy piano score, fantasy visions and quirky sequences to go with the dead-serious scenes of purported emotional pain, introduces a slightly disconcerting but certainly intriguing new comic tone.
Pálmason’s visual and compositional sense is as commanding as ever, with some stunning imagery of the Icelandic landscape. But it is flavoured with a new tone of persistent, playful unseriousness, which finally morphs into a tragicomic spectacle of male loneliness. In some places this film doesn’t have the weight and the impact of his earlier work, but it’s certainly engaging.
