Volaða Land/Vanskabte Land (Godland, Hlynur Pálmason, 2022)

Ástin Sem Eftir Er (The Love That Remains, Hlynur Pálmason, 2025)

At the start of Vanskabte Land, we are told that the film was inspired by a cache of nineteenth-century photographs and the travelling priest, Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), documents his journey across Iceland to establish a church with his glass plate camera. The source is invented – but the rounded corners of the Academy ratio film are signifiers of photography and unexpected as a means of showing the landscape.

At times, with the wide plains and mountains, the horses, the shots through the door of the completed church, we are in the territory of the Western and there’s a subtle explanation of masculinity – especially in the tension between Lucas’s Lutheranism and sexual desire and local practice. Then also a tension – which most of us will lose unless we note the subtleties of the subtitles – between Danish and Icelandic. This is a colonial narrative.

There are three striking patriarchs – the gluttonous priest who despatches Lucas, the grizzled guide Ragnar (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) whose advice Lucas ignores and confession he doesn’t take and the protective father Carl (Jacob Lohmann) who Lucas would defy for his daughter. Lucas seems to have taken the masochistic route to the outpost, and his faith is a comfort blanket that won’t help.

There’s masochism in the final sequences of Ástin Sem Eftir Er, but that way lies spoilers and – along with a moment of surreality and a changing of the seasons which adds years to a narrative – a nagging feeling that this isn’t all to be taken at face value. There are dark moments of wish-fulfilment.

Again, we have an exploration of masculinity: Magnús (Sverrir Guðnason) works at sea, fishing, for weeks at a time and had clearly drifted away from his family. He hangs around the family home, like a bad smell, and his hapless attempt to kill a boisterous rooster says something about his impotence. The family hikes and picnics hint at possible rapprochement, as might a (fantasy?) moment of upskirting.

His wife, Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir), is an aspiring artist – and a potential gallerist and her agent offer some striking light relief in what is mostly a black comedy. Her works are made outside, by exposing canvas to rust and the elements, and it is never clear whether we are meant to see these as undiscovered masterpieces or not.

For what it’s worth, I liked them.

Anna and Magnús have three quasi-feral children, belching and swearing and discussing sex – whilst they work on a knightly figurine on a cliff top (who might be Joan of Arc, judging by a sidequel I haven’t seen). They seem completely natural, given their unstable life, and a moment of crisis is not entirely unexpected.

Alongside the not-quite-melodrama, Pálmason gifts us with the beauty of Iceland – snowscapes, the sea, home movies. It moves at its own pace, and I was happy to tag along.

And whilst I can take or leave dogs, in Panda a star is born.