A new Icelandic drama with a near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score provides one of the most emotionally honest depictions of grief I've seen in a long time

When it comes to cinema, love and death are the medium's bread and butter. New drama When the Light Breaks provides its own take on those two universal themes, offering one of the freshest and most honest perspectives I've seen on the big screen in a while.

The latest film from Icelandic writer-director Rúnar Rúnarsson, When the Light Breaks follows art school student Una (Elín Hall) over the course of 24 hours after she finds out that her boyfriend Diddi (Baldur Einarsson) has been killed in a freak traffic accident. Her grief is further complicated by the fact that their affair was a secret, and Diddi was on his way to break up with his long-term girlfriend Klara (Katla Njálsdóttir) when he died. Una spends the day that follows with a small group of Diddi's childhood friends – and Klara, who rushes to Reykjavík when she hears the news.

Una struggles with the resentment she feels towards Klara and the sympathy she receives, as well as the guilt of her and Diddi's infidelity and the weight of her secret – one that was previously shared, but now rests firmly on her shoulders alone.

"I just had to get it out of my system"

When the Light Breaks is dedicated to two of Rúnarsson's friends who passed away and, although the film is a work of fiction, it channels his own experiences of grief. "It's a relief. I just had to get it out of my system, one way or another," Rúnarsson said in an interview with Variety. "But when something, like a box, has been standing on a shelf for a long time and then you move it, it leaves an empty space. I managed to get rid of the box, and I am glad it’s gone, but nothing else will be able to replace it."

Ideas of grief and loss are examined further with a piece of music that recurs throughout the film: it's by the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, who scored movies like Sicario and Arrival and died in 2018. The piece is one of Jóhannsson's first works, but it's never been used in a movie before.

Emotional debris

The thing that struck me the most about When the Light Breaks, though (other than its gorgeous cinematography, shot by Sophia Olsson, who captures both the Icelandic summer sunrises and the highway tunnel explosion with equal painstaking care), was its honesty. It doesn't seek out answers to the moral and emotional complexities at its core, nor does it attempt to moralize one way or the other. A more simplistic script would force us to empathize with Klara or demonize Una, but instead it invites us to sit with both women and their shared and separate grief.

A particularly moving scene sees the two women brush their teeth side by side in Diddi's bathroom: Una reaches for his toothbrush but, realizing she needs to feign unfamiliarity with the space, squeezes toothpaste onto her finger instead. When Klara joins her, she does the same thing in an attempt at solidarity, while the knowledge that Una has been in this exact spot many times before hangs heavy and unspoken over the pair.

When the Light Breaks is full of complicated moments like this – small, intimate acts between people trying to make sense of the worst day of their lives that carry as much irony and tragedy as they do hope and joy. Love and death are well-trodden topics for a reason: there isn't one right way to behave when your life blows up in real-time, but When the Light Breaks attempts to pick through the emotional debris.

When the Light Breaks is out now. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.