Starring: Elin Hall, Jack McEvoy, Melissa Lycey, Harvey Dean.
It All Comes with the Cold Water is a thoughtful, intimate romantic drama.
Written by Lucinda Royden and directed by Coz Greenop, this Icelandic film is inspired by a phrase from American sportsman Pete Carroll, ‘Each nanosecond of history branches off into an infinite amount of parallel universes’.
‘I’m just annoyed at myself for dreaming of it’, is the first thing we hear from Ana, an Icelandic woman in her twenties, and our lead character. What she has dreamt about is a mystery, but she is comforted by her boyfriend, Theo, an Irish photographer.
We don’t meet them at the start, which takes me to the narrative of the film. Rather than telling us a story chronologically, the film shows us the crucial intense moments in a relationship that has developed intense, challenging depth and intimacy- not by order of occurrence but in a way that will make the story make sense as a whole and existentially rather than sequentially, like a tapestry. This is a creative triumph, and challenges the audience to keep in mind narrative is not always a timeline, but more like a mind map, or the most elaborate spider-web. We see Anna and Theo navigate, together and individually, grief, anger, self-discovery, and love.
Technically, It All Comes with the Cold Water is a work of brilliance. The cinematography and muted colour palette is unmistakably Nordic, while the various shots of the mountains and sea, in their breath-taking scale and beauty, punctuate the different sequences- not least because they are central to the story itself. ‘Don’t offend the land’, says Theo’s photography mentor, ‘she listens.’ The film showcases a brilliant cast. In particular, Elin Hall plays Ana with a mesmerising mixture of profoundness and transparency. And a word about the costume design, which has been well thought out and adds to the visual quality of this understated film.
In both Ana and Theo’s lives, something is missing. Theo’s inspiration for photography is proving defiant, and Ana feels as though she is ‘mourning potential’. To this, her friend suggests, employing the Snakes and Ladders board game as a metaphor: what if we are always guaranteed to end at our square 100 but the roll of the dice decided how?
Have you ever walked past someone and felt like you know them, Anna asks us. She and Theo met by chance. Could they be what is missing from each other’s lives? Are they capable of giving the love they both need from each other and they both want to give? This an ultimate question and one that countless stories have grappled with. It All Comes with Cold Water offers this up as a pure, if slightly torturous, question rather than an exact answer, and for that it is a brilliant work of independent cinema.