Hlynur Pálmason’s Tender Family Drama

“Separated” is a fraught, transitional term in human relationships, prone to conflicting definitions by partners who have long been inclined towards conflict: a prelude to a permanent end for one, a conciliatory pause for the other. In Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason‘s striking, emotionally febrile marital drama ”The Love That Remains,” artist Anna (Saga Gardarsdottir) is ready to be be separate rather than separated from her seafaring husband Magnus (Sverrir Gudnason), while he doggedly maintains a presence in the house she shares with their three children, and occasionally her bed as well. It’s a semblance of domestic stability that she finds ever less stabilizing. 

Spiraling into surrealism as ordered lives and minds unravel, Pálmason’s fourth feature is an album of achingly felt, morbidly funny and increasingly haywire scenes from a marriage. Though very different in form and focus from the director’s 2022 stunner “Godland,” the new film shares with its predecessor an airy, understated precision of image, a fixation with the changeable moods of the rural Icelandic landscape and a dry, peculiar wit rooted in perverse curiosities of human behavior. Arguably unlucky not to have been granted a Competition slot at Cannes — it played instead in the non-competitive Premiere section — it nonetheless confirms Pálmason’s growing stature and singularity as an auteur.

The canvas here is ostensibly smaller than in “Godland,” but its textural details are rich, the tones deep and varied. The same, bar any suggestion of smallness, might be said for the stark, earthy artworks created by Anna for her latest collection. Having lost her studio to developers — an arrestingly composed opening shot shows it being dismantled from the roof downwards, an aptly discombulating visual metaphor — she embraces the outdoors as her new workspace, filling her bedsheet-sized canvases by exposing them to the elements, marking them with dirt and damp and rust. It’s a back-to-basics approach that perhaps signals her desire for fresh beginnings and simpler ways of living.

Magnus, however, would rather things remain as they always been — at least when he’s around, given how his job on an industrial fishing trawler takes him away from dry land for weeks at a time. It’s clear that Anna has long been left with the bulk of parenting duties to their three children — teenager Ída (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir) and younger sons Grímur (Grímur Hlynsson) and Þorgils (Þorgils Hlynsson) — which has begun to affect Magnus’ status in their domestic life. Her commands regarding chores or bad behavior carry more weight than his; though he sleeps over sometimes, a habit she’s trying to curb to avoid confusing the kids, he increasingly seems an awkward guest in the family home.

Loosely arranged over the course of a year, Pálmason’s script is mostly built from assorted vignettes of family activity both placid and discordant: mealtimes that are sometimes chatty and sometimes tense, a balmy afternoon picnic in which a casual glimpse up his wife’s skirt sends Magnus into an erotic reverie, a frenzied trip to the emergency room after a parent’s-worst-nightmare mishap. There’s little narrative movement, though the film gains a sense of structure and momentum from a steadily fraying sense of reality — beginning drolly when Anna, after a day spent hosting an obnoxious and finally dismissive Swedish gallerist, envisions his plane dropping from the sky.

Elsewhere, we drift into more elaborate fantasy, culminating in extended dream scenarios involving the eerie, armored scarecrow built by the children in Anna’s new al fresco studio, or the giant, vengeful rooster that haunts Magnus’ subconscious. These are amusing diversions, though “The Love That Remains” is most interesting when the line between real and unreal is blurrier: One character’s apparent fate could be an actual occurrence, their own self-berating hallucination or another’s deepest, darkest wish. As this notionally straightforward relationship drama goes ever more off-kilter, it sharply suggests the quiet chaos and latent violence in “normal” households that paper over their underlying dysfunction. 

Pálmason examines this gradual tearing with warmth and compassion for all parties, attentive to stray moments of calm or joy that arrive even amid larger emotional turmoil: the giddy, purple-spattered mess of a family jam-making project, or a slouched evening spent watching David Attenborough docs on TV in the wake of a stressful family crisis. Editor Julius Krebs Damsbo’s inventive, angular cutting evokes the sometimes aggressively polarized energies of a day’s parenting, and Pálmason’s own 35mm lensing, while often soft and crepuscular, is attentive to how shifts in weather and scenery can impact a character’s mood — or reflect it, as the film drifts away from strict realism.

Both leads are superb, equally aggravated and aggravating, brittle with neuroses that occasionally relax and part to reveal gentle need. The director’s own children, meanwhile, play their onscreen brood with gawky spontaneity and eccentric good spirits — a casting risk that amplifies the palpable intimacy of proceedings, as does the wayward, shaggy-in-all-senses presence of charismatic sheepdog (and festival Palm Dog champ) Panda, integral enough to be granted an individual place in the closing cast credits.

“Why do the chickens allow the rooster to fuck them like that?” the boys ask in all fading innocence, observing the goings-on in the henhouse at the back of the garden. Later, wondering if their parents touch each other when they’re naked, they assuredly conclude that they don’t — or at least not anymore. Wise and lyrical and strange, “The Love That Remains” thrives on its profound understanding of each family’s individual oddness, and the incremental confusion with which growing children regard their parents, as their elders grow smaller and more flawed by the day.