Somber Rumination on the Continued Decay of Iceland is Beautiful, Yet Glacial

There is a deceptive calm to Time and Water, the latest documentary from Fire of Love director Sara Dosa. Over meditative cinematography of melting ice and flowing rivers by Pedro Alvarez Mesa, Icelandic multi-platform writer Andri Snær Magnason waxes poetic about the death of the glaciers. Though these images are magisterial, Magnason is, understandably, somber and mournful. His beloved country’s natural landscape is being destroyed, and with it, the physical manifestations of his generational memories.

Time and Water is an elegiac film of uncompromising beauty. Magnason, who wrote and provides the film’s cogent commentary, lulls us into a rueful, yet relaxing state of reflection. That’s not always a good thing. His approach to the material, and Dosa’s capturing of his observations more often than not frame the rapid deterioration of the glaciers as part of a natural process. By the time Magnason has related the death of Iceland’s ice caps to global warming, the film has lost its ability to be a clarion call.

Time and Water’s Simple Poetry Risks Sabotaging Its Larger Message

To be fair, that doesn’t necessarily seem to be Magnason’s intention. More prominently, Time and Water is an effort to tie the fading of glaciers to the fading of time, and in that respect, the National Geographic documentary is stirring, making the massiveness of climate change feel intimate and personal. But the movie’s sole metaphor is hammered incessantly, and, as a result, it is glacial-paced and far too somnambulant in tone to make its impact.

Over the years, Magnason has perpetually filmed just about everything: his grandparents, his children, his wife, and the Icelandic vistas and ice peaks. Time and Water is framed as an open letter or time capsule to his children, a Herculean effort to help them understand the world that preceded them. He does this on two fronts: the declining landscape and the declining memory of his elders. The connection between these things is captivating in illustration, if repetitious and obvious.

The film works best when focusing on the domestic rather than the natural space, his love for his grandparents and the rest of his family so palpable it transcends the light touch of his lilted voiceover. He explains the monumental legacy of his family and the strange irony of having family members that have traversed ice that he is now forced to eulogize. In 2014, he became the “first” of his family to have to say goodbye to a glacier, when the Ok Glacier had melted to a point it could no longer be classified as such. It is the first to be lost to climate change.

Time and Water balances cold information with the warm remembrances of family. It’s a correlation that repeatedly works, but the film wants more variety of spirit.

As Magnason and other glaciologists explain, this is only a harbinger of things to come. We are expected to lose all glaciers within 200 years, if not sooner. At the same time that Dosa and Magnason digest this bitter news, they revel in the tenacity of nature to persist, unable to resist admiring the flowers and trees which sprout where ice once was.

Time and Water balances cold information with the warm remembrances of family. It’s a correlation that repeatedly works, but the film wants more variety of spirit. The little mention it makes of human contributions to environmental decay feels shoehorned in, almost like the filmmakers forgot they were supposed to call attention to it.

For all of its harsh reality, Time and Water is ultimately a call for hope. The cinematic apparatus is able to immortalize even all that we aim to destroy. If it’s difficult to understand the passage of time and the death of ice as tragic, Magnason supposes, then maybe a loving appraisal of intergenerational memory is here to pick up the slack, all captured on film for posterity, for all generations to know what once was, in the effort to help it come back.

Time and Water screened at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.