Watching When the Light Breaks on a recent day in Thessaloniki, I spared a thought for anyone in the audience who might be wary of Gen-Z’s famed sensitivity. For a film built around a painful secret and an awful tragedy, it’s delivered with refreshingly buoyant energy, yet the thing you hear most often is the sound of a stifled sob. It follows the death of a boy, Diddi (Baldur Einarsson), and how his group of friends cope with the immediate fallout. But here’s the twist: up until his death, he has been having an affair with a girl named Una (Elín Hall, in a captivating performance) behind the back of his girlfriend Klara (Katla Njálsdóttir). So when Klara eventually arrives on the scene, understandably devastated and taking the spotlight, it’s Una who must grit her teeth and hold back those tears.
When the Light Breaks is the latest from Rúnar Rúnarsson. This should come as welcome news to anyone who saw his feature Echo in 2019 and wondered where he’d disappeared to. In that lovely film, the director squeezed 56 vignettes into 79 minutes of festive gloom. When the Light Breaks takes around three minutes longer to tell a story about a handful of people and single traumatic event, yet it’s no less effective at suggesting messy inner lives through meticulously structured images. Rúnarsson’s temporal trick this time is to begin the story at daybreak and let it play out for the concurring 24 hours. I was surprised by how much it reminded me of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, another film that took a curious approach to unfathomable tragedy––though, unlike Van Sant, who was dealing with real lives and speculating on who or what was to blame, Rúnarsson foregrounds his disaster (an impressively rendered tunnel explosion that leaves a grieving nation in its wake) and pokes around in the aftermath.
As we begin, Una and Diddi are lovers hiding in plain sight: performance artists in their late teens who met in university, formed a band, and fell in love, but are still to break the news to anyone but Gunni (Mikael Kaaber), who is both Diddi’s brother and Una’s friend. The opening scene shows them enjoying a glorious sunrise just as Diddi leaves for the airport, promising that today will be the big reveal––a future beckons for Una that of course will never come. Instead it becomes the last time Una sees him and so she is left to grieve in silence, allowing another to take the condolences she didn’t know she needed. This impossible position (a kind of macabre Curb episode) leads to a series of minor breakdowns: first at a hospital; then at the bar where she works; and later while dancing at a house party. In-between, Una takes solace in the company of her doting father (a nice cameo from Þorsteinn Bachmann, of recent True Detective fame) and attends a memorial in the city’s iconic Hallgrímskirkja. Through patient sequences, the characters feel their way toward some kind of understanding and catharsis via confusion, humor, and occasional despair.
Outside of all the ace production (crisp, gorgeous images by DP Sophia Olsson, a beautifully deployed needle drop of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s “Odi et Amo”), what makes the film work is Rúnarsson’s mastery of tone: as Echo, there is a rawness, warmth, and depth of feeling to When the Light Breaks that feels contrary to more cynical Western-European tragicomic traditions. (It’s notable how little of the film takes place at night.) And Rúnarsson allows the tension and mystery to build: at first, Una has the self-awareness to acknowledge that her desire to break the news to Klara comes from a selfish place, yet when her reasoning changes, the process only becomes more complicated for her. Both actresses deserve enormous credit for this––the fact that they look so alike only adds to their strange chemistry (something Rúnarsson alludes to later on.) In the film’s best sequence, Una guides Klara through one of her performance pieces, asking her to look up from the base of the Hallgrímskirkja’s neo-gothic façade and walk backward. For a moment, Olsson’s camera matches her gaze: “Then slowly,” Una explains, “you fly up.”
When the Light Breaks screened at Thessaloniki Film Festival.
The post Thessaloniki Review: When the Light Breaks Showcases a Dawn-to-Dusk Tragedy with Raw Depth first appeared on The Film Stage.
