The Love That Remains

dir. Hlynur Pálmason · 2025

Snapshot

The Love That Remains (Icelandic: Ástin sem eftir er) is Hlynur Pálmason's fourth feature, a 109-minute comedy-drama tracing one year in the dissolution of an Icelandic marriage. Anna, a visual artist, and Magnús, who works at sea, have already separated as the film opens; what remains is the slow, seasonal negotiation of a shared life — three children, a home, a routine of pickups and dinners and quarrels — conducted across the rotating Icelandic year. Premiered in the Cannes Premiere section on 18 May 2025, it marks a deliberate turn for Pálmason away from the historical epic of Godland (2022) toward the domestic and the autobiographical: the three children are played by his own (Ída Mekkín, Þorgils and Grímur Hlynsdóttir/Hlynsson), and Pálmason photographed the film himself. It is at once his most intimate work and his most formally relaxed, folding absurdist and fantastical interludes — a visiting knight, an oversized rooster, a scarecrow that ages into armor across the seasons — into an otherwise grounded study of love after love. Iceland selected it as its submission for the 98th Academy Awards; it was not nominated. The film is too recent for a settled critical position, but its early reception was strongly favorable.

Industry & production

The film is a five-country European co-production — Iceland, Denmark, France, Finland and Sweden — assembled through the kind of regional-fund and broadcaster architecture that sustains Nordic art cinema. The companies of record include Pálmason's own STILL VIVID, the Danish house Snowglobe, Finland's Aamu Film Company, Sweden's HOBAB, the regional fund Film i Väst, and Arte France Cinéma; producers credited include Anton Máni Svansson (Pálmason's long-standing Icelandic producer), Katrin Pors (Snowglobe) and Rémi Burah. This is essentially the same financing ecology that backed Godland and A White, White Day, in which Icelandic creative leadership is leveraged across Danish, French and Scandinavian co-production money and the Arte broadcast pipeline.

What distinguishes the production is less its financing than its calendar. Pálmason works on a clock unusual for narrative cinema: he shoots in widely spaced blocks across an actual calendar year (and, for some elements, across years), allowing real seasonal change and real organic transformation to register on screen rather than be simulated. Reviewers noted that one strand — the children constructing a scarecrow that gradually "becomes" an armored knight — was filmed roughly two years before the bulk of the shoot, so that the object's weathering is genuine. This method imposes obvious production constraints (continuity of cast, of weather, of a non-professional child ensemble growing visibly older) and is feasible largely because the principal performers include the director's own family and because the production is built around his property and landscape in eastern Iceland. The financial footprint is small by international standards; reported theatrical box office was modest (on the order of a few hundred thousand dollars), consistent with a subtitled auteur drama released through festival and arthouse channels following its August 2025 Icelandic opening.

Technology

Pálmason continues to shoot photochemically: The Love That Remains was originated on 35mm film and composed, as with Godland, in the near-square Academy ratio (1.37:1). The choice is not nostalgic affectation but a working principle. Film stock's response to natural light, its grain and its handling of the long Icelandic dusk are integral to a project organized around weather and time; the boxy frame concentrates attention on figures within landscape and on the vertical facts of sky, wall and standing person rather than the horizontal sweep a widescreen format would invite. The seasonal, time-lapse-inflected approach — capturing decay, growth and the turning year as literal photographic record — is closer to the logic of long-exposure or interval photography than to conventional coverage, and depends on the stability of a fixed format and location over many months. The technological story here is therefore one of restraint and durability rather than novelty: no apparent reliance on digital capture, virtual production or heavy post-visual effects, with the fantastical elements (the knight, the rooster) staged as far as possible in-camera as practical, faintly handmade apparitions.

Technique

Cinematography

The most consequential craft decision is that Pálmason served as his own cinematographer — a notable break from his collaborations with Maria von Hausswolff, who shot Winter Brothers, A White, White Day and Godland. Critics singled out the "expansive sense of composition," describing images that operate simultaneously as domestic observation and as free-standing visual metaphor or "abstract enigma." The Academy frame is used for frontal, often static or slowly developing compositions in which characters are held within doorways, fields and weather; the camera tends to watch rather than chase. Natural light and the extreme seasonal range of Icelandic daylight do much of the expressive work, and the self-shooting gives the film an unmediated, diaristic relation between author and image — the director literally framing his own children and his own land.

Editing

The film was cut by Julius Krebs Damsbo, Pálmason's regular editor (also responsible for Godland). The central editorial problem is structural rather than rhythmic: the film is built as a chain of discrete, seasonally dated episodes — vignettes of family life punctuated by surreal interludes — and the editing must make a year cohere out of fragments shot months or years apart. The cutting favors duration and the held moment over compression, letting scenes breathe to the point of awkwardness or comedy, and intercutting the realist throughline with the fantastical departures so that the latter erupt without warning. Several critics felt the assembly's tonal swings were the film's chief risk, with the surreal inserts reading as more opaque than the quotidian material around them.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Pálmason stages the everyday with a deadpan precision that tips readily into absurdity: meals, school runs, an art studio, a half-built structure in a field. Objects accrue meaning through recurrence and transformation — the scarecrow-knight being the clearest instance, an element of production design that is also a unit of narrative time. The home and the surrounding eastern-Icelandic terrain function as a single continuous set, and the staging repeatedly places small human figures against large, indifferent natural fields, a compositional habit carried over from Godland and A White, White Day.

Sound

The original score is by Harry Hunt — a new collaborator, replacing Edmund Finnis, who scored both A White, White Day and Godland. The detailed record on the film's sound design is still thin given its recency, but the work sits within Pálmason's established sonic temperament: sparing music, considerable weight given to wind, sea, animals and domestic ambient sound, and silence used as a dramatic register. The presence of animals (notably the dog Panda) and the seafaring and rural settings imply a soundtrack textured by the non-human environment.

Performance

Saga Garðarsdóttir and Sverrir Guðnason anchor the film as Anna and Magnús, praised for conveying the "weary sadness of separation" without melodrama — a register of exhausted tenderness rather than acrimony. The decisive performance choice, though, is the casting of Pálmason's own children (Ída Mekkín, Þorgils and Grímur), who had already appeared in his short Nest (2022); their evident ease before their father's camera was credited with much of the film's intimacy and unforced naturalism. The ensemble also draws on Pálmason's recurring company, including Ingvar E. Sigurðsson, the lead of A White, White Day. A further, much-noted "performance" is canine: the dog Panda won the Palm Dog at Cannes 2025.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film's dramatic mode is the episodic chronicle rather than the plotted arc. There is no inciting separation to dramatize — the break has happened — and no reconciliation engine driving toward a resolution. Instead the film accumulates a year of small scenes, observing how affection, irritation, habit and grief coexist once a marriage has formally ended but its emotional infrastructure has not. Into this realist register Pálmason inserts frank departures into fantasy and dream — the knight who visits Magnús, the monstrous rooster, a sequence of drifting at sea — which function as externalized psychic states or unstable metaphors rather than plot events. The result is a hybrid: a "slice of life" structured by the calendar and the weather, with the seasons themselves supplying the sense of progression that conventional narrative causality would otherwise provide. Reviewers broadly agreed that the film's quotidian observation lands more powerfully than its surreal excursions, which some found gestural.

Genre & cycle

Nominally a comedy-drama (some listings add "family"), the film leans toward tender drama shaded with dry, absurdist humor — what one critic glossed as a "Lynchian strangeness" and "wily humor." It belongs to the well-populated cycle of the post-separation / conscious-uncoupling family film, but resists that cycle's usual therapeutic shape; it has more in common with the contemplative European art film of landscape and duration than with the relationship dramedy. Within Pálmason's own output it represents a generic and tonal pivot: where Godland was a colonial-era period epic and Winter Brothers and A White, White Day were charged with masculine violence and grief, The Love That Remains is comparatively gentle, comic and present-day — a domestic chamber piece scaled to a landscape.

Authorship & method

The film is among the most thoroughly authored in contemporary cinema: Pálmason wrote, directed, photographed and (with his family as cast and his land as location) effectively domesticated the entire production. Two collaborator facts define its authorship. First, the cinematography is his own, a departure from the Pálmason–von Hausswolff partnership that shaped the look of his prior features; this hands the film's image-making wholly to the director and deepens its diaristic quality. Second, the score passes from Edmund Finnis to Harry Hunt, while editor Julius Krebs Damsbo provides continuity with Godland. The method — protracted, seasonally distributed shooting that records real change over real time; the recurring use of his children and of Ingvar E. Sigurðsson; the patient staging of human figures within elemental landscape; the willingness to let absurd and fantastical images sit unexplained beside the everyday — is by now a recognizable signature. The Love That Remains applies that signature to autobiographical, domestic material, which makes it read as a personal summa even as it is the lightest of his films.

Movement / national cinema

The film is a flagship instance of contemporary Icelandic art cinema, the small but internationally visible wave associated with directors such as Benedikt Erlingsson, Grímur Hákonarson and Rúnar Rúnarsson, in which a dry national humor, an unsentimental treatment of landscape and weather, and modestly scaled human stories are leveraged onto the festival circuit through Nordic and French co-production. Pálmason, Danish-trained (a graduate of the National Film School of Denmark) and based between Denmark and Iceland, embodies the cross-border character of this cinema; his films are Icelandic in language, location and sensibility but Scandinavian-French in their financing and craft personnel. The Love That Remains sits squarely in that tradition while pushing its landscape-and-weather aesthetic toward the domestic and the comic.

Era / period

Released in 2025, the film is contemporary in both setting and concerns, and it arrives at a moment when slow, photochemically shot, festival-oriented auteur cinema occupies an increasingly defended niche against streaming-era production norms. Its 35mm origination, Academy framing and year-long shoot read as a considered position within that mid-2020s landscape: an argument for cinema made on the timescale of life rather than of schedules. The film's themes — separation, co-parenting, the persistence of love past its institutional form — are likewise of their moment, addressed without the period or genre distancing of Pálmason's earlier work.

Themes

The governing theme is the title's: what survives the end of a love — the residue of intimacy, obligation and tenderness that does not dissolve when a marriage does. Around it cluster Pálmason's persistent preoccupations: time and transformation, rendered literally through the turning seasons and the weathering scarecrow-knight; the entanglement of the human and the natural, with landscape, animals and weather as co-actors in the drama; family, childhood and the texture of domestic routine, here drawn directly from the director's own household; and grief in a quieter key than the acute loss of A White, White Day — the diffuse mourning of a relationship that continues in altered form. The surreal interludes extend a further theme: the porousness of the everyday to dream, fear and imagination, the sense that ordinary domestic life is shadowed by figures (a knight, a monster) that give shape to its anxieties.

Reception, canon & influence

Early critical reception was warm to enthusiastic. The film drew a notably high positive tally on aggregators (Rotten Tomatoes recorded unanimous early positive reviews from a small sample) and praise from major trade critics, who singled out Pálmason's compositional command, the unaffected performances of his children, and the film's emotional honesty, while registering reservations about the surreal sequences as "opaque rather than illuminating." Its festival run — Cannes Premiere, then Toronto and New York, with a Special Mention at Film Fest Gent — and the Palm Dog for Panda gave it a strong circuit profile, and Iceland's selection of it for the Academy Awards (it advanced no further than submission) confirmed its standing as a flagship national release.

The influences on the film are legible. Backward, it draws on the tradition of the European art film of duration and landscape, on the deadpan-absurdist strain of Nordic cinema, and on a Lynch-inflected willingness to admit the uncanny into domestic realism; within Pálmason's own corpus it extends the elemental, time-based method of Godland and A White, White Day into autobiographical territory, and grows directly out of his short Nest, which first cast his children. Its legacy forward cannot yet be assessed — the film is barely a year old at this writing, and any claim about what it shaped would be speculation. What can be said is that it consolidates Pálmason's standing as one of the defining Icelandic auteurs of his generation and offers a conspicuous model of a viable, deeply personal cinema built on slow, seasonal, self-photographed, family-centered production — a model whose wider influence will only become visible with time.

Sources consulted for grounding include the film's Wikipedia entry, the Cannes Festival listing, and The Hollywood Reporter review; where the documentary record is genuinely thin — particularly on sound design and on forward influence — that is noted in the text rather than filled by conjecture.