When the Light Breaks, by Rúnar Rúnarsson

The Icelandic drama, originally titled Ljósbrot, meaning ‘refraction’, is a poetic and formally rigorous meditation on grief. Set against the windswept, sometimes forbidding Icelandic landscape, the film opens with the abrupt death of an art student, Diddi, in his early twenties, killed in what is described as the country’s worst-ever road traffic accident, claiming at least a dozen lives. From this rupture, the narrative tracks his stunned girlfriend, Klara, as she drifts through Reykjavik over the following twelve hours, shell-shocked and numbed.

This is the fourth feature by Rúnar Rúnarsson, a forty-eight-year-old director whose work, since his 2011 debut Volcano, has been marked by a realist-inflected humanism, often aligned with the Scandinavian tradition of intimate, socially attuned storytelling. Rúnarsson’s cinema, much like that of Roy Andersson or Ruben Östlund, frequently foregrounds alienation, but tempers it with grace notes of communal tenderness. Here, Rúnarsson structures When the Light Breaks almost like a chamber drama in the tradition of Bergman or Dreyer, creating a compressed dramatic arc within a single day. In this way, the film echoes the formal strategies of neorealism –observing characters over a sharply delimited slice of time, privileging realism over overt narrative artifice– but reconfigures them through a stark, modern Icelandic aesthetic.

As the film progresses, Una (Elín Hall), Diddi’s clandestine lover, encounters Klara (Katla Njálsdóttir), who is naturally at the centre of public sympathy. Una, a shadowy presence in Diddi’s life, is left on the margins. Their eventual collision delivers the film’s most arresting and emotionally potent scenes. Klara clings to Una, and the viewer is left to wonder: does she know of Una’s affair with Diddi? Ultimately it seems beside the point, as their shared grief transcends such questions. In a strikingly poetic visual motif, Klara and Una are shown on opposite sides of a glass window, the camera composing their reflections to appear momentarily as one — an image that visually articulates the way grief both unites and distorts its victims, collapsing identities and blurring boundaries between people. 

Una’s grief, rendered in Hall’s riveting, bodily performance, undercuts the film. In one sequence, the group of friends, including Una and Klara, drunkenly dance to Icelandic rock music, for a moment allowing their bodies to forget. But remembrance inevitably returns, as some weep. The oscillation between remembering and forgetting is precisely where grief resides: in that fragile interstice, where the present moment is both unbearable and compulsively revisited.

Structurally, Rúnarsson condenses the events of a single day into eighty-two minutes. Initially this feels almost insufficient, as if the material could have sustained a short film. But on second thought, this temporal compression evokes the experience of grief itself, a state where time stretches, collapses, and becomes newly configured. Film theorist André Bazin once described cinema’s power as “mummifying time,” preserving its textures and flows; here, Rúnarsson shows that time within grief becomes radically unstable. Moments that should dissolve last painfully long, while others vanish with terrifying abruptness. With director of photography Sophia Olsson, he builds a visual language that captures this warping of temporality, alongside a harsh, unyielding Icelandic beauty that refuses to stand still for its mourners.

One especially resonant sequence features Una teaching Klara to “fly” as part of a performance piece. Shot from a high, almost omniscient vantage, Una urges Klara to stand at the base of Hallgrímskirkja’s striking neo-gothic façade, look skyward, and to walk backward, arms outstretched. Olsson’s camera moves with them, lifting the viewer’s perspective as Una runs backward, describing how “then slowly, you fly up.” This image echoes an entire tradition of cinematic metaphors for transcendence — recalling Tarkovsky’s levitating characters or the dream-logic of Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon — while remaining rooted in bodily, grounded experience. Perhaps this is what grief resembles: we run backward with arms open, desperate to fly, but remain tethered to the earth, spinning in a dizzying pulse. Yet even in that doomed attempt, there is unexpected beauty, as if the fracture of light (ljósbrot) creates its own refraction, its own partial grace.

Rúnarsson’s film is ultimately a study in how mourning transforms the texture of the everyday: In its gentle, poetic empathy, When the Light Breaks finds its most resonant truth — that beauty, though irreparably fractured by loss, still finds its way.