POP UP CINEMA BRIGHTON

White Wall Cinema presents

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THURSDAY NOVEMBER 26TH​

THE LOVE THAT REMAINS
 NEW RELEASE SPECIAL 

DIRECTOR: Hlynur Pálmason

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STARRING: Saga Garðarsdóttir, Sverrir Gudnason, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir, Þorgils Hlynsson & Grímur Hlynsson

One of the most anticipated White Wall screenings of 2026, The Love That Remains is a delicately woven family drama that pushes against cinematic convention and instead offers a deliberately non-sensationalist tableau of modern familial dynamics, infusing its fractured narrative with an ethereal sensation layered over its characters' distinctly quotidian lifestyles.

The Love That Remains is a deliberately gentle, deeply intimate, slyly humorous look at love and separation that allows odd sensations and human compassion to flourish throughout.

Director Hlynur Pálmason’s story follows Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir), a sculptor and visual artist (who works with themes of decomposition and decay), and her husband, Magnús (Sverrir Gudnason), who is often away for weeks at a time enduring the frigid conditions aboard an industrial fishing trawler. Three children, a dog and a few chickens complete the family unit, whom we now track through the course of the year as Anna and Magnús attempt to work through the uncertain terrain of their marital separation.

Undoubtedly melancholic and drifting, it's also a remarkably funny and insightful film that confidently wrong-foots you as it charts the ordinary, day-to-day lives of the family, with a feeling that something bizarre and surreal could break through at any moment.

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Gorgeously shot on 35mm film, the imagery of the beautiful and barren Icelandic landscapes and the family's cosy yet practical interiors are exquisitely captured by the writer and director Pálmason, who also acts as cinematographer.

Perhaps its closest comparators might be Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure and Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value, but The Love That Remains occupies a cinematic space entirely its own. Meditative, spiky, amusing, bizarre and quite beautiful, Hlynur Pálmason has pulled off a strange magic trick of a movie, full of peculiar charm as it balances the mundane and the inexplicable.​ 

The result is a breath of fresh Icelandic air: a film that stimulates aesthetically, psychologically and emotionally. Boasting 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, it is not to be missed on the big screen. You won't see anything quite like it this year, or maybe next (or probably even the year after).