A White, White Day

A White, White Day

The film “A White, White Day” by Hlynur Palmason begins with an extended opening scene where a car drives slowly along a remote and winding road on one of those days when the fog makes it impossible to tell where the sky ends and the earth begins. It’s a long shot that ends in tragedy, but it’s also a prelude to a movie about “what we can’t see,” as one character puts it later the blurriness of grief, the fuzzy state that people inhabit when they won’t face their feelings.

It feels at times as if Mr. Palmason is being self-indulgent with his slow pace, but Ingvar Sigurdsson keeps the film solidly grounded; and he finishes it off with such a shattering final image that I’m not sure I could say anything bad about this movie even if I wanted to. It takes its time getting there; but once it does wallop.

Mr. Sigurdsson plays Ingimundur, an Icelandic police officer on the eastern coast who is old enough to have an 8-year-old granddaughter but still young enough to work full time. When he’s not on duty in this mountainous part of Iceland (the world?), which appears to be empty except for him and his ex-wife’s lover (whom Ingimundur is stalking), he builds houses his own house now, mainly and he completes them: He’s like one of those sturdy characters who gets things done without worrying too much about why they need doing or how you’re supposed to feel while you’re doing them, except that once in a while his hand will tremble slightly before he nails two boards together.

Those first three paragraphs contain more plot than Mr. Palmason gives away for quite some time, and rightfully so: His film isn’t really “about” any of these things so much as it is about everything else that goes unmentioned, but lingers in the air.

Ingimundur doesn’t talk about his wife much, and Mr. Sigurdsson is a master at showing how memories of her are beginning to infiltrate daily life again. Perhaps it’s because building houses is so domestic the one he’s working on now is meant for his granddaughter and daughter to live in someday that we turn to physical labor when our hearts are burdened; or maybe it’s just that doing manual work can help us sleep better, as a therapist tells Ingimundur during their sessions.

(He claims never to have had trouble sleeping, but does anyone believe that?) All I know is that my own heart was racing throughout “A White, White Day,” which builds tension like few films I’ve seen this year; and by the time it gets to that shot of Mr. Sigurdsson inside another car driving straight at the camera well, I might as well have been sitting behind the wheel.

Skillful at balancing the normality of everyday life with his protagonist’s abnormal grief spiral, Palmason is known for shooting films that are filled with dynamic and perplexing language. At times, his camera will almost wander away to focus on an unbelievably annoying show that the granddaughter is watching or cut together a montage in which ordinary objects are intercut with images from the crash.

I think it’s subtle but I think it’s reflecting the fractured state we move through in grief in which the normal and abnormal alternate throughout our day. Even the opening scene is followed by a fascinating series of images of the house at different times of the day and even seasons. A scene of death is followed by one of ordinary life. The world keeps turning.

All this reaches an end point I won’t spoil but that I found remarkably moving: It’s an image of a man who is finally able to recall a happy moment from his past; a face that is dealing with emotion he has claimed not to have. Almost as if the enveloping fog from the opening scene has finally lifted.

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