The Icelandic director Hlynur Palmason, in his second feature-length film, shows an acute sensitivity to the potential relations between environment and cinematic pace. He exercises that quality in ingenious and galvanic ways in “A White, White Day,” an eerily gripping study of grief — and impotence in its face — with the trappings of a revenge thriller.

Ingvar Sigurdsson plays Ingimundur, a rough-hewed semiretired police officer in late middle age. He lives in a small community on the eastern coast of Iceland, a land both beautiful and harsh, a sparsely populated environment where time itself seems to hang in the cold air.

Ingimundur spends time with his former colleagues, dotes on his adorable 8-year-old granddaughter, Salka (a remarkable Ida Mekkin Hlynsdottir), and works on renovating a building for her, and his daughter and her husband, to live in. Part of this process is shown in a startling series of static shots, taken at various times of day and even seasons, early in the movie, a montage that pulls the neat trick of feeling both fast and endless.