Lodge skrifar meðal annars:
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.
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.
