Movie review
August 14, 2025 · 109 min · R · Icelandic
Woke Score
Lower is better
Review
The Love That Remains is a 2025 Icelandic comedy-drama directed by Hlynur Pálmason. It follows a family in the rural countryside as the parents navigate their separation over one year, mixing humor and emotion around fading love, shared memories, and daily life with their children and dog. The story includes noticeable beats around the husband’s masculinity struggles, loneliness at sea, crude behaviors such as dealing with an aggressive family rooster, and persistent advances, set against the wife’s push for artistic independence and shifting gender dynamics in their relationship.
Breakdown
These are the editorial factors and ratings behind our score for The Love That Remains.
Woke representation / casting
The cast is an authentic all-Icelandic ensemble matching the rural setting, with the director casting his own children in the kid roles for a natural, personal touch. No patterns of identity signaling, quotas, or mismatched representation appear.
Woke political dialogue
Limited crude male talk appears on the trawler and in boys’ comments about a hen, plus behavioral elements like persistent advances; no explicit political speeches, activist dialogue, or ideological lectures are present.
Identity-driven story themes
The narrative includes recurring threads of the husband’s masculinity struggles, loneliness and pent-up aggression at sea, crude male work environments, and behaviors such as killing the aggressive rooster or unwanted advances, contrasted with the wife’s artistic independence and dissatisfaction with the domestic setup. These gender-role dynamics surface in episodic, often humorous or surreal beats within the separation story.
Western institutional / cultural critique
The film portrays examples of toxic male behavior (rooster dispatched at wife’s request as control/domestic chore, trawler life with fights and lewd calendars, persistent male advances despite rejection) and frames male inability to be alone or loneliness at sea as running ideas per some critics. Director acknowledges a “playful critique of masculinity” and a tender male-gaze scene; some reviews interpret elements through a feminist lens on male patterns. However, the overall tone stays light, poetic, and personal with humor and lingering affection rather than heavy systemic or activist condemnation of patriarchy.
Woke character or canon changes
Not relevant. This is an original story with no source material or established characters altered for ideological reasons.
Anti-woke backlash and complaints
No anti-woke or right-leaning complaints were found accusing the film of pushing woke, DEI, or identity politics messaging. Coverage centers on its artistic and emotional qualities.
Creator track record context
Hlynur Pálmason has explored masculinity themes across his films and has publicly described this one as containing a playful critique of masculinity with fascination for basic male needs and experiences. This reflects a pattern of gender-focused inquiry in his personal arthouse work, though presented lightly rather than through activist or identity-politics priorities.
Production
