A Quiet But Intensely Felt Grief Drama

The longest days in your life are those where a loved one dies. Exhausting waves of feeling lap each other over the hours, stretching and blurring them as disbelief gives way to panic, to fatigue, to deep and paralyzing sadness, all while practical tasks mount and accelerate. As you struggle through forms, travel plans and an immediate onslaught of phone calls, the memory of yesterday taunts you with its nearness and distance. How could life have been so different then? Will it ever be so ordinary again? In “When the Light Breaks,” Rúnar Rúnarsson poignantly dramatizes the vastness, smallness and strangeness of one such day, following rawly bereaved art student Una (Elín Hall) through the immediate, suffocating aftermath of her lover Diddi’s sudden passing — with spiraling emotions further confused by unresolved secrets between her and the dead.

For Una cannot openly speak of her love for Diddi (Baldur Einarsson). The two were firm friends and college bandmates, but their romantic relationship was a recent, furtive development, kept hidden from their peers and from Diddi’s long-distance girlfriend Klara (Katla Njálsdóttir). When the two women meet, awkwardly thrown together by their friends’ collective mourning, a sense of mutual loss supersedes any confession or explanation. Rúnarsson’s film eschews easy melodrama for a more tacit, sensory exploration of the sudden connections that death forges among the living. The future waits in limbo; simply getting through the day is drama enough.

Spanning one single, dreadful day and running under 80 minutes, this is a tighter, simpler work than Rúnarsson’s last feature, 2019’s “Echo” — which was similarly brief but far more discursive in its multi-vignette structure. “When the Light Breaks” is more in line with Rúnarsson’s sensitive close-up character studies “Volcano” and “Sparrows,” likewise playing the intimate interiority of a protagonist’s personal crisis against the stark grandeur of Iceland’s light and landscape. It opens on an iridescent magic-hour composition, with Sophia Olsson’s camera caressing Una from behind. With Diddi, she stares out to sea as the evening sun sinks into it, the resulting coppery blaze electrically outlining her entire person, though it may as well be love doing that. With minimal dialogue, Rúnarsson and his actors capture an honest, tactile soul connection as the two head home in the summery afterglow, and fall asleep in each other’s arms.

In the morning, Diddi is to fly home and break up with Klara. To Una, together-forever-ness awaits. But a tracking shot of ceiling lights in a Reykjavik traffic tunnel — as menacing in its patient composure as the previous night’s sunset was ecstatic — spells doom, as the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s solemnly ethereal recording of “Odi et Amo” presages a catastrophic tunnel fire. With Diddi among the many killed, Una is left to find her own place in a national tragedy, the communal reach of its impact doing nothing to dull her inchoate sense of abandonment and isolation. As the day unfolds, she drifts between friends, family and solitude, uneasy in any company, unhappy alone. Only Gunni (Mikael Kaaber), Diddi’s brother, knows the true nature of their relationship, though there’s no time for heart-to-hearts, least of all when the innocently devastated Klara arrives in town.

Una’s initial impulse is to avoid the other woman, though Klara, naively or otherwise, gravitates nervously toward her. Perhaps the equal intensity of their grief is something of a magnetic force. As Diddi’s friends drink and dance through the afternoon, the two young women are paired in an unspoken kinship that quickly escalates, if only for this one day, into a deeper, more needful understanding. Cool but not emotionally aloof, Hall’s sharp, tightly wound performance implies a personality given to tension at the best of times, in need of close human contact to draw out her happiness. As it is, she’s both rigidly poised and visibly shattered: The plain portraiture of Olsson’s camerawork gives her puffy-eyed devastation nowhere to hide.

Rúnarsson’s sparse script isn’t interested in engineering more seismic confrontation or catharsis, as “When the Light Breaks” instead trades in the kind of tentative realizations and ambiguities more commonly found in short-form storytelling. That can give the film a softness, a gauziness even, that is initially unexpected in a story so grave. Yet it comes to feel appropriate for a dramatization of a day when everything changes, but no clear future immediately presents itself. In each other, Una and Klara find something to cling to in the haze, at least for the moment. Another sunset is coming, and perhaps they’d rather not watch it alone. “It’ll be strange to wake up tomorrow,” Klara muses. “Do you know what you’ll do?” It’s a question for another day, and another film.