'Sentimental Value': Falling in Slow Motion
Nominated for both the Academy Award and BAFTA for Best Film and Original Screenplay, Sentimental Value presents an extraordinary challenge: how do you tell a story that spans 106 years, jumps between multiple time periods, follows several protagonists, and yet feels completely coherent—even inevitable? How do writers Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier make a narrative this structurally complex feel emotionally devastating rather than intellectually confusing? Sentimental Value offers a masterclass in how sophisticated structure can serve profound emotional truth. The answer to its success lies not in clever tricks, but in understanding how transformation actually works—both in human psychology and in storytelling craft.
The film's most audacious structural choice is to make the house itself the story's primary consciousness. This isn't merely atmospheric—it's the key to everything. When twelve-year-old Nora writes a school essay personifying her family's Oslo home, she intuitively grasps something the writers understand deeply: the house is the witness, the container, the only constant across generations of births, deaths, collaborations, betrayals, and transformations. The house "liked being full," Nora writes, and "didn't like silence"—especially "her mother's silence." Most crucially, the house has a crooked foundation, discovered when it was built a century ago, and has been "still sinking, collapsing—just in very slow motion." This becomes the film's governing metaphor: the family has been falling for generations, and the entire story takes place in that suspended moment before impact. By establishing the house as consciousness rather than mere setting, Vogt and Trier permit themselves to move fluidly through time. The house sees everything simultaneously. We're not jumping between time periods arbitrarily—we're experiencing how memory actually works, how the past lives in the present, how ancestral trauma doesn't stay buried but surfaces when conditions are right.
That surfacing happens at a precise moment: the midpoint of the film, during the funeral reception after Nora's mother has died. The light shifts—literally, the sun moves behind a cloud—and suddenly time collapses. The camera glides through the now-empty present-day rooms and dissolves into the 1930s, where we discover Karin's full story. Nora's grandmother, accused of Nazi collaboration in 1943, was taken by the State Police, imprisoned, and then fled to Sweden. She returned years later with a new identity - Karin Borg, wife of a Swede - but couldn't escape the shame. In 1958, at age thirty-six, she hanged herself in "the room at the end of the hallway." This revelation is devastating not just historically, but mathematically: Nora (Renate Reinsve) is thirty-five, one year younger than Karin was at her suicide. The pattern is repeating. The terror Nora feels isn't just stage fright before her National Theatre debut—it's inherited trauma becoming conscious. The panic attack that opened the film suddenly makes horrifying sense. She's not just an actress with performance anxiety; she's a woman standing at the same age, in the same house, where her grandmother's life ended. The writers make this work by ensuring every element earns its place: the crack in the foundation (visible in Nora's childhood bedroom wall), the heavy silence after the parents' divorce, even Nora's choice to become a performer rather than face emotional truth directly. When the past erupts into the present at the midpoint, it doesn't feel like a gimmick—it feels like recognition.
Understanding why Nora and her father Gustav need each other reveals the film's deeper character mathematics. Nora is a performer who measures her worth by external achievement. She's reached the pinnacle—lead role at Norway's most prestigious theatre—yet she's terrified, asking a fellow actor to slap her so she can escape the performance. Her mother died while Nora was on stage. All that professional success proved worthless when it mattered most. Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), meanwhile, is an ageing film director whose entire career has been built on avoiding his deepest wound: his mother Karin's suicide. Now, for his final film, he wants to face it directly—an autobiographical piece about the house, the suicide room, the family pattern. But he can't finish it. The material is too heavy, too intense. His lead actress, Rachel (Elle Fanning), withdraws: "I'm never going to get it... How a mother could do that." Gustav's authentic vision lacks the discipline to complete it. Nora's disciplined achievement lacks authentic depth. Together, they create what neither could alone. This isn't sentimentality—it's precise structural design. The writers understand that transformation often requires two seemingly opposite forces working in tandem: skill meeting truth, discipline meeting depth, achievement meeting authenticity.
The film's structure enacts a fundamental shift that happens precisely at that midpoint. In the first half, Nora tries to control everything. She panics backstage and flees the stage multiple times. She asks Jakob to slap her—attempting to create visible injury that would give her a legitimate excuse not to perform, rather than simply admitting she's terrified. She races to the nursing home in a taxi, makeup remover in hand, desperate to arrive before it's too late (she doesn't). At the funeral reception, she suppresses her grief to manage food and guests. Every strategy fails. Every attempt to force an outcome produces the opposite result. Then, after the midpoint, something changes. She stops forcing. When her father nearly dies from exposure (drunk in the winter garden, a kind of slow-motion suicide attempt), Nora doesn't try to fix him or lecture him. She simply sits beside his hospital bed and holds his hand. When Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) is crying while arranging food, Nora hugs her sister—unprompted, unperformed, genuine. When the house is sold and renovated beyond recognition (the beautiful old kitchen torn out, everything painted sterile white), she accepts it. Most crucially, when Gustav asks her to act in his film—to literally perform her grandmother's suicide in a reconstruction of that death room—she says yes. She serves his vision rather than pursuing her own ambition. And because she's now allowing rather than forcing, she can enter that room, step onto the chair, loop the wire over the ceiling hook, and then step down when the child actor interrupts. She performs the transformation without being consumed by it. The writers show us that the second half of any real transformation isn't about trying harder—it's about letting go.
The true genius of Sentimental Value lies in how Vogt and Trier use time itself as the primary transformation medium. The film operates at multiple scales simultaneously: a single night (the theatre performance), a weekend (funeral and aftermath), a childhood (Nora's essay and memories), a historical trauma - Karin's 1940s story - and a century (the house from 1918 to 2024). Each temporal scale contains the same pattern: someone trying to perform normality while dying inside, until the performance cracks and truth emerges. This is a fractal structure—the same design repeating at different magnifications. The final revelation completes the fractal brilliantly: the "family house" we've been watching for the last act is actually a film set, a detailed reconstruction built inside a studio. Gustav is directing, Nora is performing, and Agnes's young son Erik is playing the child. The physical house has been sold, renovated, and its soul erased by generic white paint. But the essence—the truth of what happened there—is being preserved through art. The sequence is breathtaking: matter (the actual house) becomes image (the film set) becomes spirit (the completed film). The writers literalize what all art does: transforms trauma across time, making the unbearable bearable by giving it form. When Gustav watches Nora perform the suicide scene and simply says "Perfect," then "Cut," we understand this isn't just about finishing a film. It's about two people, separated by divorce and decades of avoidance, finally collaborating to heal what couldn't be healed alone. The house dies. The film lives. The pattern transforms.
What can writers learn from Sentimental Value? First, that structural complexity isn't the enemy of emotional clarity—it's the vehicle. When your structure mirrors how consciousness actually works (past and present bleeding together, memory operating non-linearly, trauma surfacing when defences drop), audiences don't experience confusion. They experience recognition. Second, that the midpoint isn't merely a plot device—it's the moment when everything the protagonist has been forcing must fail so something new can emerge. Nora's panic attack happens in the first ten minutes, but the real transformation begins when Karin's story surfaces at the film's mathematical centre. Third, that multi-protagonist narratives succeed when each character represents a different facet of the same transformation. Nora embodies achievement without authenticity. Gustav embodies authenticity without achievement. The house embodies witness without judgment. Together, they create wholeness. Fourth, that time can be your material rather than your constraint. By showing how one family's pattern repeats across four generations, Vogt and Trier make their specific Oslo house into something universal. Finally, and most importantly: you can be THIS structurally sophisticated and still make audiences weep. Technical mastery doesn't create emotional distance—when structure serves truth rather than cleverness, it creates emotional depth. Sentimental Value proves that the most profound human experiences (grief, inherited trauma, the search for worth, the need to be seen) don't need to be simplified to be felt. They need to be structured with precision, so that form and feeling become inseparable. That's what makes this screenplay worthy of recognition—not its complexity, but its integrity. Not its cleverness, but its courage to trust that if you build the architecture right, the emotion will land exactly where it needs to.
Fair Use Notice: Film stills from Sentimental Value (2025, directed by Joachim Trier) are copyright of Mer Film, Eye Eye Pictures and co-production partners, and are used here for criticism and commentary under fair dealing (UK) and fair use (US) provisions.
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