“By showing this completely different side Pálmason establishes himself even more as a director to watch.”

There is a wistfulness about Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason’s latest effort, and it starts with its title, The Love That Remains. It hints at the broken marriage of Magnús (often lovingly abbreviated into Maggi, and played by Sverrir Gudnason) and Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir), and everything suggests the breakup is recent; while the cause of their rift remains elusive, they are in that period where she at least at times hates his guts, but where the occasional bout of sex is also still on the table. For the sake of their children, teenager Ída and the two slightly younger boys Grímur and Þorgils (all played by Pálmason’s own children; he has assured the world that his own marriage is not on the Icelandic rocks), Anna and Maggi still spend a lot of time together with their brood, although Maggi is often weeks at sea on an industrial fishing trawler. Anna is a visual artist, creating images on canvas from the rusty metal sheets that she places on them for weeks to let the elements do their thing. It isn’t a very successful career so far, as exemplified by a pompous Swedish gallery owner coming for a visit to assess her work, but hardly giving it a cursory glance before pontificating about the benefits of drinking two glasses of wine every day. The little Cessna plane he leaves in later drops into the cold waters around Iceland in an oddly comical scene; the wild horses witnessing the crash are not perturbed.

Nature is relentless and unmoving anyway in Pálmason’s fourth feature, as it has been before in his work, most notably in his previous film Godland, where it became a character in its own right, almost swallowing up a Danish priest coming to a remote settlement on the island. Where that film was oppressive, maximalist cinema at its finest, in The Love That Remains Pálmason keeps things more minimal, painting the relationship between Anna and Maggi as a series of snapshots; Scenes from a Divorce, if you will, to riff on Ingmar Bergman’s classic. He often connects these disjointed scenes with shots of a humanoid, knight-like figure that the kids build up over time at the site of Anna’s artistic endeavors. Match-cuts take us from day to night, from summer to winter, the poor lifeless figure enduring the harsh weather of Iceland without complaint.

Until the kids start using him (or is it her? The film wonders too) for target practice. As the film gets more surrealist, and one of the boys’ bow-and-arrow play goes horribly wrong to comedic after-effect, the figure comes to life and visits the family’s home at night, where it runs into Maggi. It is one in a series of increasingly absurdist moments, which started with the aforementioned plane crash, and continue with a sword falling from the sky next to the (at that point still lifeless) knight, and the biggest moment of surrealism after Maggi kills the family’s rooster when Anna complains that the animal had become too aggressive. That night, as Maggi has fallen asleep on the couch while watching the horror classic Creature from the Black Lagoon, the rooster, now grown to more than man-size, comes to throw him around like a rag doll and drag him off.

An aggressive rooster is not the only example of toxic male behavior in the film. The two boys dismissively talking about one of their hens being a ‘whore’ can be brushed off as typical boyish behavior, and the oafish gallery owner gets his comeuppance. But then there is also the calendar of naked women on the trawler, with a lewd comment written across it, and Maggi’s continuous attempts to get Anna in the sack when she clearly is past that point. At one point, during a picnic of sorts out in Iceland’s vast nature, far less threatening than in Godland but no less beautiful and imposing, Anna stands over him to give him a playful look under her skirt. The moment gets his blood pumping and his imagination runs wild, as he gets caught in so much fabric that he is clearly not under Anna’s skirt anymore, but it doesn’t put down the horndog in him. Male inability to be alone is one of the film’s running themes, not strange when the male protagonist spends weeks with other men away from anything resembling a woman. Their pent-up masculinity reaches dangerous levels on the ship, resulting in a fist fight or two. The end of the film, which sees Maggi floating in the sea waiting for a boat to pick him up after he jumped off the trawler when learning about his son’s shooting accident, is a clear metaphor for male loneliness.

The film is awash with metaphors, from Anna’s art being a result of a process of corrosion to a large sea mine that gets caught up in the nets of the trawler. The film opens up with Anna’s original studio being demolished, the roof being lifted off whole, as a reference to her failing marriage. The further we go into the film, the more Pálmason loses himself in these metaphors and in the absurdism, causing the seams of the film to come loose, and The Love That Remains starts to frustrate a little. Still, by showing this completely different side he establishes himself even more as a director to watch. Supposedly his next project is going to be more in the vein of Godland, which will get the highbrow crowd back that he might lose a bit with The Love That Remains, but as a go-between this film is a perfect bridge and a further showcase of his talent as a filmmaker that can surprise you.