'The Love That Remains' review: Icelandic domestic drama reinvents the form

The beautiful, quirky and melancholic “The Love That Remains,” by Icelandic filmmaker Hylnur Pálmason (“Godland”), begins with a bracing shot from inside a long, empty seaside building, where we can see the roof suddenly torn off by some outside force. As it floats in the air, we can consider the two parts of this single whole and how the light changes within this deconstructed space.

In a sense, that is the summary of the entire film, as we meet a family of five living after a separation. Visual artist Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) seeks to establish herself while still living in the rural house she shared with her teenage girlfriend. Growing alienation leaves fisherman Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason) living on the high seas on a large fishing boat as his control over internal security diminishes. Meanwhile, their children (the teenager Ída and the twins Grímur and Þorgils (the trio played by director Pálmason's own children)) exhibit a healthy absorption of circumstances, facing the moments of coexistence with a lot of humor and spirit.

What we pick up from the past comes from the fragmented present, as if we were leafing through a stranger's exquisitely curated album (there's only Harry Hunt's piano score for sad commentary). Elsewhere we see that home-cooked meals, chores, and foraging excursions sometimes bring this fractured family back together. But when Magnus pushes to stay for a while, Anna firmly claims her independence.

While they are separated, their working lives (his at sea and hers on land) speak to a confluence of the elemental and the man-made. Serving as his own cinematographer (and excellent at 4:3 framing), Pálmason revels in the scope and weight of deep-sea fishing, a seasonal craft that gives purpose to Magnus's days and nights but also fosters an increasingly unwanted loneliness. Meanwhile, Anna dedicates herself to land art, transforming machine-etched iron cutouts placed on white outdoor sheets into large-scale pieces with rusty motifs. However, getting your work appreciated is another matter. In a painfully funny sequence, a visiting gallerist (and gas bag) barely seems to care about her art, showing more interest in a goose nest that has materialized in an enclosure.

Is love another natural element susceptible to aging and wearing out? Throughout a time linked to the change of seasons, full of images of impressive beauty, Pálmason seeks a feeling that only patient observation produces: a lasting reality about the passage of relationships. One of the director's frequent visual cuts is a doll dressed as a knight that the children build in a picturesque place, tied to a stake. It is an indelibly funny and heartbreaking totem, suggesting play and suffering and ultimately manifesting wounds both real and internalized. (The director's 2022 short film “Nest,” which captures the construction of a treehouse over a year, is a precursor to his temporal approach to this film.)

Following in the footsteps of Pálmason's masterful “Godland,” a 19th-century colonizing epic of faith and conquest that couldn't be more different, “The Love That Remains” positions this filmmaker as a talented craftsman of adult storybooks, regardless of era or scope. This is delicate, confidently imagined fiction, made with the eyes of a naturalist, the heart of a believer in family, and a sensibility that leaves room for both the Pythonesque and the Lynchian.