From Iceland, 'The Love That Remains' shows a fractured family tied to the landscape

The gorgeous, quirky and melancholy “The Love That Remains,” from Icelandic filmmaker Hylnur Pálmason (“Godland”), opens with an exhilarating changeable from wrong a long, bare seaside building, from wherever we tin spot the extortion abruptly wrenched disconnected by immoderate exterior force. As it hovers successful the aerial above, we get to see the 2 parts of this one-time full and however the airy changes wrong this deconstructed space.

In 1 respect, that’s the full of the movie encapsulated, arsenic we brushwood a household of 5 surviving successful the aftermath of a separation. Visual creator Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) looks to asseverate herself portion inactive surviving successful the agrarian location she shared with her teenage sweetheart. The expanding alienation leaves fisherman Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason) surviving offshore connected a large trawler arsenic his clasp connected home information slips. Their kids, meantime — teenage Ída and duplicate boys Grímur and Þorgils (the trio played by manager Pálmason’s ain children) — grounds a steadfast absorption of the circumstances, gathering moments of togetherness with plentifulness of wit and spirit.

What we glean of the past comes from the fragmented present, arsenic if we’re leafing done a stranger’s exquisitely curated medium (there’s lone Harry Hunt’s soft people for bittersweet commentary). Elsewhere we spot that home-cooked meals, chores and foraging excursions occasionally bring this fractured household backmost together. But erstwhile Magnus pushes to enactment for a while, Anna firmly claims her independence.

While apart, their moving lives — his astatine sea, hers connected onshore — talk to a confluence of the elemental and the man-made. Pálmason, who serves arsenic his ain cinematographer (and a large 1 with the 4:3 framing), revels successful the expanse and heft of deep-sea fishing, a seasonal commercialized that gives intent to Magnus’ days and nights but besides fosters an progressively unwanted solitude. Anna, meanwhile, devotes herself to world art, turning machine-lasered robust cutouts laid connected achromatic sheets successful the unfastened aerial into large-scale, rust-patterned pieces. Getting her enactment appreciated, however, is different matter. In 1 painfully comic sequence, a visiting gallerist (and gasbag) hardly seems to attraction astir her art, showing much involvement successful a goose’s nest that has materialized successful an enclosure.

Is emotion different earthy constituent susceptible to property and wear? Across a moving clip tied to the shifting seasons, pocked by images of breathtaking beauty, Pálmason is aft a feeling that lone diligent observance yields: a lasting world astir the passing of relationships. One of the director’s predominant ocular cutaways is to a knight-outfitted dummy the children physique connected a picturesque spot, lashed to a stake. It’s an indelibly amusing and heartbreaking totem, suggesting play and suffering, and yet manifesting wounds some existent and internalized. (The director’s 2022 abbreviated “Nest,” which captures the gathering of a histrion location implicit a year, is simply a precursor to his temporal attack to this feature.)

On the heels of Pálmason’s masterful “Godland,” a 19th period colonizer epic of religion and conquest that couldn’t beryllium much different, “The Love That Remains” nevertheless positions this filmmaker arsenic a talented craftsman of big storybooks, nary substance the epoch oregon scope. This is simply a delicate, confidently imagined fabrication made with the eyes of a naturalist, the bosom of a believer successful family, and a sensibility with country for some the Pythonesque and the Lynchian.