What is home? A house? In Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s masterpiece on family drama, a house is a witness to a family’s history, trauma, and grief. A space where the things we carry within ourselves somehow become part of the structure: the cracks, the old stove where voices l i n g e r a nd t e l l stories, the shivering sunlight cast on a wall. Trier builds his Norwegian drama, which won last year’s Cannes Grand Prix, around the idea that a home is an archive. In fact, it begins with a simple narration of a child’s essay about what it is like to be a house — when it feels heavy, lighter, empty, and when it loses sight of its inhabitants once they move beyond its line of “vision.”

The film tells the story of a broken family. It follows the reunion of Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), a renowned filmmaker, and his estranged daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), after the death of his ex-wife.

While Nora, played with extraordinary restraint by Reinsve, is the central figure, the narrative also shifts to the points of view of Gustav and Agnes. Nora is a theater actress, and this choice is intentional, not decorative. Trier does not decorate his characters with professions, but assigns them with psychological precision. Nora’s work allows her to inhabit other people, other lives, other pain. Onstage, she can hide behind characters. Offstage, she remains guarded, fearful of intimacy, repeatedly drawn to emotionally unavailable men. And we understand why.

Unmarried and childless, Nora lives with panic attacks and depression — depicted here with painful accuracy. The film does not aestheticize her suffering or turn it into spectacle. Her anxiety simply exists, as it does in real life. 

In fact, everything in the film is intensely real, intimate, and deeply empathetic toward its characters, with Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt nailing the complexity of how lived experiences and childhood trauma shape who we become as adults.

Trier understands how our inner lives influence our outward paths, and how who we are professionally is inseparable from how we were built emotionally. Nora’s distance from others is not presented as a flaw to be corrected, but as a survival mechanism formed early, rooted in abandonment and emotional neglect.