The Love that Remains aka Ástin sem eftir er (Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, France 2025: Dir Hlynur Pálmason) Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) is a struggling artist, her preferred medium a series of large canvases onto which geometric shapes are laid, with the works exposed to the elements to weather and degrade. The awkwardness of her art, and of the unequipped studio in which she forges her pieces, matches that of her personal life. For Anna is in the process of separating from her husband, Magnús (Sverrir Gudnason), a deep sea fisherman whose life is divided between his work, trapped on a boat with his rough and ready colleagues, and trying to salvage his relationship and manage the parenting of their three children, daughter Ída (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir) and sons Grimur (Grímur Hlynsson) and Þorgils (Þorgils Hlynsson).
The Love that Remains follows the family for a year, over which time their relationships and routines change, with Magnús slowly being eased out of the unit, seemingly not accepting that the marriage is over; in fact he seems to be more in lust than in love with his ex, seeing her at one point as a suspended upskirt image.
As well as this extrication, Anna also experiences continued difficulty in selling her art, or even getting it accepted; one self absorbed gallery owner visits her, leads her on and then lets her down just before he flies home.
The bleakness of both landscape and situation is leavened by the natural behaviour of the children, whose wisdom sometimes exceeds that of their parents. Puzzlingly there are also some surreal moments, possibly inspired by Anna's mindset, which inject an awkward humour into the proceedings; the plane occupied by the gallery owner for example, who has stolen a goose egg despite being told not to, crashes after flying into a flock of birds. Is this Anna's wishes ideated, or the goose's revenge?
Pálmason's movie is sometimes willfully obscure, and its visual codes tricky to decipher. But it's a beautifully shot piece, and the performances are uniformly confident, if occasionally unedifying. The opening shot of the film, in which a roof is craned off the top of an empty building, parallels the metaphoric roof removed from Anna's house, allowing us a dispassionate look at what happens within.
Day to day supervision of Diana's treatment is provided by head nurse Farah (Kate Dickie), a brusque but caring figure in thrall to the (still living but rarely glimpsed) clinic founder, Dr Frances Tréphine (Patricia Tulasne) and his dead wife Joan, whose portraits occupy the walls in every room.
But as Diana's recovery slowly progresses, she's plagued by horrific visions, and spies Homer, who often vanishes overnight, mysteriously conspiring with Farah. And it's Diana's growing feeling of paranoia, that all may not be what it seems in the clinic, and doubts about her husband's integrity, that drives the core of Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer's second feature.
The directors mentioned in interview that they wanted to evoke the spirit of the 1970s British horror film, even going so far as to use vintage lenses to establish the correct look. The result gives Honey Bunch a slight Peter Strickland feel, creating a world at once both recognisable and off kilter; the muted colour scheme, deliberately slow pace and country house setting (although filmed in Canada) is perfect, providing even more power to the moments of shock and grotesquerie.
But lest this be written off simply as a well done pastiche, Honey Bunch has much more to offer. With no disrespect to their performances, it is perhaps the fact that Glowicki and Petrie are a real life couple that provides the depth of their onscreen relationship, the pieces of the narrative gradually falling into place as Diana struggles to understand what is happening to her. By the end of Honey Bunch Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer have pulled off an extraordinary feat; to bring forth from the bones of a mystery film a stunning portrayal of love and what it means to be in love. A truly special film.
Channing Tatum plays Manchester who, when we first meet him, has established his modus operandum by breaking into remote stores via the roof (hence his moniker), in this case a McDonald's. All he needs is some money for his family, and his good guy credentials are quickly established by donating his own jacket to a coatless employee he's about to shut in the freezer while he makes his escape.
Despite being caught, the enterprising Manchester ingeniously busts out of prison and evades capture by entering and hiding in a Toys "R" Us outlet, his presence masked by creating a kind of dugout behind a bike rack. It's clear that the guy's intentions are ultimately to take some money, but it's also important to establish a home and and to integrate himself into the day to day running of the store, walking around the premises at night and even going so far as to hang his washed laundry in the aisles. He hooks up some CCTV and it's here that he sees shop worker Leigh Wainscott (Kirsten Dunst), a single mum with two daughters, for the first time. His subsequent double life relationship with her, and the sadness of his estrangement from his own biological family, make up the heart of the film, ably supported by Peter Dinklage as the horrendous store manager and Tony Revolori as Jeffrey's single male friend.
Tatum is the perfect blank canvas on which to build the Manchester character, his 'lovable hunk' persona perfect for creating the 'crim with a heart' figure. While, despite being based on a true story, this occasionally veers into mawkishness, Tatum is never less than affecting. His foil here, and the real star of the show, is Dunst. When she's on screen the camera can't tear itself away from her ever changing face, veering from happiness to a mask of pain in seconds; a churchgoing woman with two daughters who slowly accept Manchester - under a different name - into their lives. The scenes of the shopbreaker being unknowingly accepted by the parishioners is particularly affecting.
This might be a true life story by the numbers, right down to the the end credit photos of the real Manchester - and footage of an unbelieving Wainscott - but Cianfrance knows what he's doing here, creating an often funny, captivating story about a character who refuses categorisation but seems universally liked (even by his captors), while also saying something about the obvious distance between Manchester's emotional and creative intelligence.
So it's seen as an honour rather than an outrage that Hussein demands that every class in every school bake a cake to mark his birthday, irrespective of the difficulties involved in assembling the ingredients because of scarcity. In one school, 9 year old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) is picked by ballot to make the cake; failure is not an option. Lamia lives with her grandmother, Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) in a riverside hut; she is confident to travel by water to school on her own, but is elsewhere a wide eyed child with only a basic understanding of her circumstances. It is assumed that Lamia's parents have perished in the conflict (there are signs of the struggle all around, although it's rarely explicit) and the weight of responsibility on the old woman's back forces her to make a decision which impacts directly on the little girl.
On the one hand, and despite the challenging conditions in which Lamia lives, there is a certain innocence to her separation from Bibi, with only her pet rooster Hindi and off/on contact with schoolfriend Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem) accompanying her continued quest for cake ingredients. Her travels highlight the effects on a populace of a country where survival is dependent on trade, barter and favour.
The President's Cake is not without its humour - the military disciplined schoolteacher who fires off instructions to his pupils is like a character from Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, a comparison that also applies to Lamia's exploits; Nayyef is a revelation as the little girl who is exposed to so much and almost grows up in front of us. That this is Hadi's debut feature is astounding; he manages to balance a deftness of storytelling with a light directorial touch which doesn't shy away from the more monstrous aspects of the regime, not least the newsreel which closes the film. A very very fine movie.
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