‘The Love That Remains’ Trailer – Hlynur Pálmason’s Icelandic Oscar Entry Turns Heartbreak into Beauty

Directed by Hlynur Pálmason, The Love That Remains opens a window into the life of a family as the parents separate.

Saga Garðarsdóttir and Sverrir Gudnason play a couple whose decades-long relationship dissolves and leaves their three children and home on shifting ground. Starring alongside them are Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir, Þorgils Hlynsson, along with Grímur Hlynsson as their children, and a sheepdog named Panda, who steals scenes.

The Love That Remains premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and went on to screen at major festivals including the 50th Toronto International Film Festival and the 63rd New York Film Festival. It was selected as the Icelandic Oscar entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, and will open in US theaters on January 30, 2026.

Here is the synopsis: Anna, an artist, and Magnús, a fisherman, live with their three children and charismatic sheepdog in the quiet grandeur of the Icelandic countryside. As the fractures in their marriage come to the surface, the couple try to hold onto the afterimages of a life together and make sense of a deep and lingering devotion. Filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason (Godland) brings surprising humor and emotional weight to this gorgeous, intimate, and brilliantly expansive scenes from a marriage, amidst the majestic backdrop of the changing seasons.

Variety review calls it “wise, lyrical and strange,” writing, “… 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.”

The Guardian describes it as a “startling tragicomic portrait of a fractured family” writing, “The Love That Remains is a portrait of a fractured family and a sundered marriage which, with its dreamy piano score, fantasy visions and quirky sequences to go with the dead-serious scenes of purported emotional pain, introduces a slightly disconcerting but certainly intriguing new comic tone.”

Watch the official trailer for The Love That Remains above.