Icelandic filmmaker Hylnur Palmason captures a year in the life of a family as two parents navigate their separation. With its dreamy piano score, fantasy visions and quirky sequences alongside dead-serious scenes of emotional pain, its intriguing yet unsettling comic tone marks it out from other divorce stories.
Anna (Garðarsdóttir) is a sculptor and visual artist whose focus is decomposition and decay; her husband, Magnús (Gudnason), is a fisherman assigned to an industrial trawler. The pair seem resigned to their ships-in-the-night routine, but gradually, it becomes clear that this isn’t a completely agreeable arrangement.
The reason Magnús acts like a guest in his own home – and awkwardly around his three children – is that he doesn’t really live there any more.