Film review: A White, White Day (15)

With an elliptical script and a gift for composition Hylnur Palmason’s Icelandic study of betrayal and grief is slow paced but effective

On a white, white day - or foggy, if you are feeling prosaic - at the start of this Icelandic drama, we follow a car snaking through walls of thick mist along a deserted country road.

It’s a sequence loaded with foreboding but when the vehicle does miss a turn and plops through the safety barrier, it’s an oddly mundane tragedy. (The roads in Iceland, though deserted, are a cinematic death trap – earlier this lockdown The County also centred on a driving fatality.)

Left behind is Ingimundur (Sigurdsson.) He has the look of a scandi noir detective but this widower copper’s only investigation is into an intense grief that he is resisting all attempts to let go of.

From inside his half-built house, he broods on his marriage and the possibility that his wife had been unfaithful.

Writer/ director Palmason could go on to become something special. He has a gift for compositions that generate maximum impact without calling attention to themselves.

The withholding of information in his elliptical script is very effective. This study of grief crawls along, but when it moves into the realms of conventional drama it feels like a betrayal.

4/5 stars