{"id":112832,"date":"2025-05-18T22:46:09","date_gmt":"2025-05-18T22:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/112832\/"},"modified":"2025-05-18T22:46:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-18T22:46:09","slug":"family-drama-premieres-at-cannes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/112832\/","title":{"rendered":"Family Drama Premieres at Cannes"},"content":{"rendered":"

If Icelandic filmmaker\u00a0Hlynur P\u00e1lmason\u2019s work<\/a> has an overall motif to date, it could be summed up by lines from Joy Division\u2019s eponymous post-punk anthem, whose chorus merely goes,\u00a0\u201cIsolation, Isolation, Isolation\u201d. His mise-en-sc\u00e8ne strongly betrays that his country\u2019s population is only 350,000, its hills and horizons feeling untouched, and existing as they likely had centuries ago. Despite this notion\u2019s connection with settlements and colonialism, its landscape also suggests a\u00a0tabula rasa, bounding with potential to harness, beauty to reap, and the capability to inspire artistic creativity and love.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cGodland\u201d,<\/a> his\u00a0breakout 2022 feature\u00a0following an unstable Danish priest establishing a new church on the islands, exhibited the darkest variation on these ideas, with formal ballast for acres, despite a surplus of solemnity, and obvious pinches from\u00a0\u201cThere Will be Blood\u201d\u00a0and Werner Herzog<\/a>. He\u2019s been touting another spectacularly ambitious movie,\u00a0\u201cOn Land and Sea\u201d, but pivoted to\u00a0\u201cThe Love That Remains<\/a>\u201d\u00a0as a follow-up, a more intimate project shot piecemeal over several years, referencing difficult events in his life, if stopping short of raw auto-fiction.<\/p>\n

\"'Slauson<\/a> \"'The<\/a> <\/p>\n

Premiering in the non-competitive Cannes<\/a> Premi\u00e8re section at this year\u2019s festival, P\u00e1lmason completes a transition from maximalism to minimalism, tracking a nuclear family somewhat similar to his own as it disintegrates. His own children\u00a0\u00cdda, Gr\u00edmur, and\u00a0\u00deorgils\u00a0are the fictional couple\u2019s brood, with the female lead Anna (Saga Gar\u00f0arsd\u00f3ttir) mimicking his vocation as an artist (if with about a quarter of his international renown), and her fianc\u00e9, the dumpy, yet endearing Magn\u00fas (often shortened to Maggi, and played by\u00a0Sverrir Gu\u00f0nason), shipping out for weeks on a herring trawler, a place to luxuriate in photogenic vistas and calm sunlight, without promising the slightest possibility of real human intimacy. With her practice consisting of Anselm Kiefer-esque metallic land art, Anna has a disappointing visit from a Swedish gallerist, whose assessment is\u00a0\u201cnot this time\u201d; after his mini-plane\u2019s outbound exit, she decries him as\u00a0\u201cboring\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

P\u00e1lmason is an exacting image-maker, giving us crystalline natural panoramas that apportion their beauty carefully, yet his screenplays are deliberately more fragmented, often to their detriment. In\u00a0\u201cGodland\u201d\u00a0and his Cannes Critics\u2019\u00a0Week calling-card\u00a0\u201cA White, White Day\u201d, this shattered sense of trajectory spiraled into hypnotic bleakness; here, he braids various fragments to relate a time-honored story of love lost, yet the immaculacy of the construction doesn\u2019t help us\u00a0feel it as viscerally as he\u2019d like. Here, still waters run a bit shallow.\u00a0<\/p>\n

An immediate limitation is that what initiated Anna and Maggi\u2019s breakup is so vague. They begin the film<\/a> ostensibly\u00a0\u201ctogether\u201d, then it\u2019s undeniably clear the latter now lives elsewhere, although their new co-parenting arrangement sees significant, and quite bearable time spent in each others\u2019\u00a0company. P\u00e1lmason, shooting on 35mm in Academy ratio, loves his master shots composed with roomy depth of field. Symmetry through recurrent objects entered in the frame is common, with temporal match-cuts employed to take us from day to night, or even sunlight to surrounding snow. The five family members are scattered amidst these wide compositions, with close-ups tightly rationed. In this mode,\u00a0\u201cThe Love That Remains\u201d\u00a0often feels like his attempt to enshrine this era of his immediate family in stopped time \u2014 a memento \u2014 like an artsy version of the iOS Photos app slideshows that pop up in our notifications.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That analogy creates a logical segue for contemplating what\u2019s innovative and forward-thinking about P\u00e1lmason\u2019s work here and overall. Late in the film, he chooses to transition from one image to another with a laptop browser\u00a0\u201cflip\u201d\u00a0sound effect, and it collapses inwards like if you minimize a window on screen. This feels a bit forced and corny, and the director becomes even more outlandish depicting Maggi\u2019s dreams as their relationship feels fully unsalvageable: a rooster disturbs him in real life, then visits him in giant,\u00a0anthropomorphized\u00a0form in his dream to injure him or worse. It\u2019s a tonal shift that just about works, due to its knowing sense of contrast.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If\u00a0\u201cThe Love That Remains\u201d\u00a0has a kindred spirit in contemporary auteur cinema, it evokes a far-less edgy and kooky version of Carlos Reygadas\u2019 \u201cOur Time\u201d\u00a0(indeed, the Mexican\u00a0enfant terrible\u00a0sits on the main competition jury this year). Both experiment with how to distress the marital dramas of the\u00a0\u201cKramer vs. Kramer\u201d\u00a0and\u00a0\u201cScenes from a Marriage\u201d\u00a0vintage; one has 70s British prog rock and polyamory, with the other comparatively faltering for not exploring a more passionate or erotic direction. But P\u00e1lmason\u2019s overall sincerity has its dividends, even for what it lacks in candidness: the poignant closing shot distills that this is his vision on this eternal topic, open to the risk that its alternating visual modes won\u2019t harmonize. The love remains in Maggi\u2019s heart, but can\u2019t encompass and combine with all the love Anna,\u00a0\u00cdda, Gr\u00edmur, and\u00a0\u00deorgils\u00a0respectively have kept and also eliminated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Grade:\u00a0B-\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Love That Remains\u201d debuted in the Cannes Premi\u00e8re section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Icelandic filmmaker\u00a0Hlynur P\u00e1lmason\u2019s work has an overall motif to date, it could be summed up by lines…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112833,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[5839,77,3063,3943,6082,51115,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-112832","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-cannes","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-film","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-reviews","13":"tag-the-love-that-remains","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114531269669408268","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}