"Sentimental Value"- Walls, too, have stories of their own

Sentimental Value

At the funeral of Nora’s (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes’s (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) mother the two sisters meet again with their estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) once a renowned film director. Although he has followed from a distance the paths his daughters have taken – one now a successful theatre actress, the other happily married with a child – he has been nothing more than an absent shadow in their lives for years. Upon his return, Gustav insists that Nora take the leading role in a film he has written as an attempt to confront his traumatic childhood and his mother’s suicide. Nora initially refuses, driven by her own inability to overcome the pain, disappointment, and loneliness she has carried since her parents’ separation.

What makes Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value (2025) such a remedial piece of cinema is the seemingly impossible tenderness with which deep ancestral wounds are opened – and with even greater delicacy left to bleed, so that they may finally be healed.

Among the film’s intimate ensemble, the house in which not only Nora and Agnes but also Gustav, his mother, and generations before them grew up becomes a central character in its own right. The opening shot reveals a panoramic view of Oslo that gradually moves toward the house – the camera seems to glide along its walls, tracing its scratches with care, slowly and patiently entering its interior. The parallel between the characters’ inner worlds and the condition of the house is a recurring motif, a key to their journey back to one another and to discovering the means – the “language” – through which they can communicate.

Gustav does not know how to express his love for his daughters, nor how to communicate the regret he feels for having left them – at least not in the way they would want him to. In the scenes where we see Nora and Agnes angry and struggling to articulate the pain of being abandoned, he simply insists that both of them read his script. Almost nothing is revealed about the film’s plot, except for the final scene, in which the protagonist sends her son off to school and then takes her own life. When Nora refuses the role, Gustav offers it to Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), a promising American actress, and takes her to the house to show her the room where his mother committed suicide and where he intends to shoot the film. Although Rachel repeatedly points out that the project is far more personal than Gustav admits, she ultimately proves to be right. The script is not merely an idea for a film adaptation – it is the only way Gustav can bring past and present together and achieve the long‑desired “complete sync between time and place.”

Sentimental Value

For her part, Nora also hides behind the roles she plays on stage. Her failed attempts to speak with her father intertwine with scenes from rehearsals and premieres, where she manages to express the emotions she suppresses in real life. For her, embodying a character has become a hidden and safe way to connect with her experiences, to voice them through someone else – something she has done since childhood, when she imagined the house as a living being, capable of feeling touch, hearing sounds, and suffering from the silence left behind after Gustav’s departure. A real conversation between Gustav and Nora never actually happens; it takes place through the film they work on – through a shared act of creation. Their path back to one another follows the mechanisms each of them has separately developed as a substitute for genuine and open conversation. This inevitably raises the question: isn’t art, too, a form of speaking with complete sincerity?

Sentimental Value

There is a brief but pivotal moment in which the film enters the contemporary debates surrounding streaming platforms and the kind of content they produce. Sentimental Value, much like the film Gustav wants to make – the film within the film – deliberately moves in the opposite direction of the hastily assembled, easily digestible, superficial, and emotionally poor “products” created in the name of statistical success. Against this backdrop of the modern film industry, Sentimental Value stands out as a compassionate, non‑aggressive, yet quietly assertive provocation – one that seeks us to confront our fears, pains, and emotions left unspoken. They already demand our attention, no matter how much time has passed, and only when we look closely at them and listen to what they have to say can we reconcile with what we have lived through, shape it into something beautiful, and move forward.

Only then can we repaint the house. Even though it will always remember.