Sundance ‘26: ‘TIME AND WATER’ Moves at the Pace of a Glacier, and Feels Just as Cold

Sara Dosa’s highly anticipated follow-up to Fire of Love arrives with the same promise of poetic science-meets-humanity. But where her debut doc was incandescent, this one plays like a glacially paced elegy that mistakes lyricism for emotional pull.

Time and Water wants to be an elegy and a time capsule. Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason, tasked with eulogizing Okjökull — the first glacier declared “dead” due to climate change and provided a “Glacier Funeral” — folds his nation’s vanishing ice into a meditation on memory, family, and loss. There is something admirable about pivoting away from the didactic, statistic-heavy environmental documentary toward a more generational, emotional register. And Dosa clearly aims to make us feel what’s disappearing rather than just understand it.

But the result too often feels like watching someone else’s home videos. Maybe moving in fragments, though numbing in the long stretches between them. The film leans heavily on photographs, home movies, and shared memories, but these artifacts never quite build into an experience worth inhabiting. Instead of pulling us into the majesty of ice and the weight of time, the film nearly insists we appreciate these majesty of the glaciers and the impact of their loss because… well, because it does.

Part of this failure lies in the central subject’s somewhat icy demeanor. Magnason’s narration is as steady as a fjord in January, measured to the point of monotony. There’s thematic symmetry in having a Scandinavian subject speak about cold loss with cool affect, but thematic symmetry doesn’t equal cinematic engagement. If anything, his restrained delivery magnifies the film’s core problem: too little emotional tension for those outside his circle.

This is a movie about loss, but it loses something else along the way: urgency, momentum, and, occasionally, the viewer’s attention. Where Fire of Love fused spectacle and intimacy into something electric, Time and Water drifts like its subject matter: quietly, slowly, and without enough pull to justify its pace.

In the end, appreciating this film requires a particular patience and a willingness to be moved by implication rather than experience. It’s generous in intent – and its message of conservationism should not be ignored – but as a cinematic experience, undercuts itself in execution. Cryogenic in tone, elegiac in ambition, but too cool to truly feel.

CONCLUSION: ‘Time and Water‘ moves at the pace of a glacier, and unfortunately feels just as cold. Sara Dosa’s anticipated follow-up to ‘Fire of Love’ is ultimately a major snooze about ice loss that struggles to thaw.