Reviewed on May 15th at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival – Un Certain Regard Section. 82 Mins
Cast: Elín Hall, Mikael Kaaber, Katla Njálsdóttir, Baldur Einarsson, Gunnar Hrafn Kristjánsson, Ágúst Wigum
Genre: Drama
Director: Rúnar Rúnarsson
In Irish Cinemas: 23rd May 2025
In this quietly powerful and emotionally resonant film by acclaimed Icelandic director Rúnar Rúnarsson, two young women mourn the loss of the same man—a shared lover whose absence binds them in sorrow. Subtle yet deeply affecting, the film opened last year’s Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, offering a poignant meditation on love, grief, and the unexpected connections forged through heartache.
There are few days longer, heavier, or more surreal than the one in which someone you love dies. Time stretches unnaturally, warped by relentless waves of emotion that crash over one another—grief, disbelief, panic, exhaustion, and a sorrow so deep it becomes almost immobile. Amid this emotional deluge, real-life demands refuse to pause: phone calls pile up, travel must be arranged, and forms must be filled. And through it all, the immediacy of yesterday haunts the present. How could life have felt so ordinary just hours ago? And will it ever feel that way again?
In When the Light Breaks, Icelandic filmmaker Rúnar Rúnarsson distils the vastness and disorientation of this kind of day into a quiet, emotionally saturated film that unfolds over less than 80 minutes but carries the weight of a lifetime. The story follows Una (Elín Hall), a young art student reeling in the immediate aftermath of her lover Diddi’s sudden death. The film begins with beauty and intimacy—an evening scene by the ocean. Una and Diddi (Baldur Einarsson) are wrapped in each other’s company, the sunlight casting them in copper glow. It’s an almost timeless image of connection, of promise. But by morning, that moment is already a tragically and irrevocably distant memory.
Diddi is supposed to fly home the next day to end things with his long-distance girlfriend, Klara (Katla Njálsdóttir), so he and Una can begin a more open chapter together. But fate intervenes cruelly: a devastating tunnel fire claims Diddi’s life, and with it, any possibility of the future Una imagined. What remains is a day of unbearable mourning, one in which she must navigate not only personal grief but the added complexity of a love kept secret.
Because Una and Diddi’s romance had only just begun, and was deliberately hidden, Una finds herself isolated within her sorrow. To the outside world, they were simply close friends and bandmates. Only Diddi’s brother, Gunni (Mikael Kaaber), knows the truth. And there’s no room for confession or closure when the spotlight of collective mourning is turned outward toward a nation in shock.
Rúnarsson resists sensationalism and melodrama, opting for a film that lives in the unspoken, tactile, and emotionally granular, when the Light Breaks is not about dramatic reveals or reconciliations. It’s about the aching quietness of loss, the confusion of shared grief among strangers, and the strange intimacy that can arise when two people orbit the same pain.
Una and Klara, awkwardly thrust together by circumstance, do not clash or unravel in confrontation. Instead, they form a wordless alliance, bound by a mutual sense of emptiness. There is no place for jealousy here; both women are adrift in the same current. Rúnarsson portrays their growing connection with subtlety, never forcing sentiment. Theirs is a relationship born not of resolution, but of recognition—two young women clinging to each other in the haze of grief, simply trying to make it through the day.
Elín Hall delivers a performance marked by restraint and inner turmoil. Her Una is taut with unexpressed emotion, a woman both aching for contact and incapable of fully reaching out. She is someone who feels too much and says too little, and Hall renders this contradiction with quiet precision. Cinematographer Sophia Olsson captures her in clear, naturalistic light, often in close-up, offering no escape from the rawness of her pain.
Stylistically, the film feels more distilled and focused than Rúnarsson’s previous work, particularly the more experimental Echo (2019), which offered a mosaic of Icelandic lives through vignettes. Here, the narrative is tightly contained to a single day and a single character’s fractured experience. Yet the emotional resonance is no less expansive. As in Volcano and Sparrows, Rúnarsson uses the stark Icelandic landscape not as a backdrop, but as an emotional amplifier—its vast skies and muted colours reflecting Una’s inner disorientation.
Even in its brevity, When the Light Breaks feels like a complete immersion into one of the most private, universal human experiences: losing someone you love before you could live out what you imagined with them. The film moves gently but with purpose, balancing lyrical moments with grounded realism. Rúnarsson doesn’t offer catharsis. Instead, he provides a kind of emotional verisimilitude, acknowledging that sometimes the most we can do is survive a shattered day.
By the film’s end, Una and Klara are not friends, enemies, or rivals, but something far more nuanced—co-survivors. They may not know what comes next, and neither does the viewer. The film closes not with resolution, but with a shared uncertainty, captured in a simple, aching line from Klara: “It’ll be strange to wake up tomorrow. Do you know what you’ll do?”
It’s not a question with an answer. Not yet. But sometimes, just making it to the next morning is an answer enough.
Overall: 6/10
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