# Sentimental Value: Joachim Trier's House of Grief

*Film, TV & Music · Marcus Reed · 2026-10-08*

## TL;DR

Sentimental Value is Joachim Trier's 2025 film about the Borg family and their Oslo house, following stage actress Nora Borg as her estranged father Gustav asks to film inside the home she is trying to sell. It premiered at Cannes in May 2025 and drew a lengthy standing ovation.

## Key facts

- The film is directed and co-written by Joachim Trier, the Norwegian filmmaker behind Oslo, August 31st and The Worst Person in the World.
- It premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025, where it received an extended standing ovation.
- Renate Reinsve plays Nora Borg, a stage actress whose father Gustav, played by Stellan Skarsgård, wants to shoot a film in the family house.
- The story centers on the Borg family home in Oslo and the sisters' decision about whether to sell it.
- Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas plays Agnes, Nora's sister, and Elle Fanning plays an American actress drawn into Gustav's production.

## Sentimental Value: Joachim Trier's House of Grief

Joachim Trier is a Norwegian director, and his film *Sentimental Value* (the Norwegian title is *Affeksjonsverdi*) premiered in 2025. It arrived with real weight behind it, a Cannes selection that kept people talking long after the lights came up. The story it tells is small on paper and enormous in practice: one family, one house, and all the noise that gets trapped inside its walls.

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar once wrote that when a person loves a house, that person also comes to own a life that belongs only to them. That line sits underneath everything here. The film opens on a school assignment. Nora, a sixth grader, is asked to write about an object as if she were that object, and she chooses her house. She describes how the house's stomach trembled when she and her sister Agnes ran down the stairs and out the back door. She wonders whether the house watched them until they slipped past the hedges onto the street, and whether it could still see them after that.

She asks stranger things too. Does the house hurt when someone walks across the floor in high heels? Do the walls feel sad when a wine glass is thrown at them? Can a house be tickled? Her father Gustav Borg tells her the house was built a hundred years ago with a structural flaw, and that it has been sinking slowly ever since. That collapse happens so slowly that generations of her family have lived inside it and simply watched it give way, one hairline crack at a time.

There is a detail in the composition that lands like a slap. Nora never once uses the word "fight." She calls her parents' endless conflict "noise." When her father leaves, the house grows lighter and quieter, and the absence of noise becomes its own kind of ache. As Gustav walks toward his car, Nora sits bent over a table, sobbing. The narrator says the house misses the other noises the father made. In the shot of him leaving, Trier cuts from winter to summer at the same angle, one second apart. He walked out the way a man heads off to work. He never came back, and he never said goodbye.

That is the whole film in miniature, and it grows from there: a family with a traumatic past, living their painful stories in the same rooms at different times. The house becomes a kind of storage unit for trauma. As the story goes, Gustav's mother is said to have endured severe torture under the Nazis and to have taken her own life in that house. Gustav, father of two daughters, separated from his wife and walked out. Years later, after his ex-wife died, he came back to face what he had left behind.

What strikes me is how hard Trier refuses to give us the reunion we keep begging for. Gustav never makes it to Nora's show. We see the empty seat. We see Nora excited and exposed. This time, when the panic rises, she does not ask her boyfriend to slap her across the face. We see Agnes, and we see the chair beside her. If Gustav had walked in and applauded and the two of them had fallen into each other's arms, we would have drowned happily in the sentiment. Life does not work like that, and northern stories work like that even less. When Agnes asks her father why he did not come, he answers that Nora never invited him. You just stare at the screen.

Gustav builds every human connection he has through film. The scene where he and his grandson shoot something on a phone camera is one I watched three times. Art is the only place this man knows how to show love. His fatherhood and grandfatherhood are both damaged, and the birthday gift he reportedly gives the boy makes that plain: DVDs of Michael Haneke's *The Piano Teacher* and Gaspar Noé's *Irreversible*. It is a small, funny, alarming moment, and it earns one of Nora's rare smiles at her father.

Gustav also functions as a mouthpiece for the director's own frustrations about contemporary culture. In one line he complains that today's artists belong to the petty bourgeoisie, that you cannot write *Ulysses* while comparing insurance prices on the way to soccer practice, and that artistic freedom has been lost. He is a difficult man to love, and the film knows it. One of its sharpest lines is that loving someone full of rage is never easy. Rage destroys the permeability that love needs. You cannot understand someone you are angry at, and you cannot love someone you cannot understand.

When Nora turns down the role in her father's script, she tells him the reason plainly: because you do not know me. Her anger at the man who carried his noise out of the house and left them in silence is the most honest emotion in the film. Gustav never says "I love you" to her. What he says instead is that she will never regret having children. That line follows a scene where the two of them smoke in the garden without speaking. Afterward, Nora walks alone in the dark, her face wet, and a door opens. She paces a room, and we brace for the collapse. She crumples onto the edge of a bed, weeping exactly the way the prayer passage in her father's script describes. Then the camera pulls wide and we are in a rehearsal. Trier seems to have sworn an oath never to hand the audience a single cliché. The next shot puts Gustav in a car listening to "Same Old Scene," and the familiar father-daughter bond is kept just out of reach.

The phrase that gives the film its title reportedly appears only once. While the sisters divide up the household objects, Nora initially shrugs off the whole exercise. Then, pushed by Agnes, she assigns "sentimental value" to a red vase and sets it on the table. When her father and Rachel turn up at the house unannounced, she panics and knocks into it. The vase almost breaks and she grabs it just in time, then leaves. That moment is the film's metaphorical summary in the same way Nora's composition is its textual one. I read it as a signal: because the vase survives, Nora will end up acting in her father's film. Had it broken, she would not have. Chekhov's famous rule fits this movie exactly. If a gun hangs on the wall in act one, it has to go off before the curtain falls. Gustav, drunk, calls his daughter and reportedly tells her he does not like theater but he does like Chekhov.

The prayer passage is the scene the whole film is built around. Trier reportedly had the same text read aloud twice, once in English and once in Norwegian, and the effect is devastating. Rachel reads it first, Nora second. The people who could not cry the first time cry the second. The people who cried the first time come apart completely the second. The words are a confession about growing up in a house where none of it mattered, about never being baptized, about a civil confirmation instead, about lying in bed crying and hearing that prayer is not really a conversation with God. It is a refusal to accept helplessness, the only move left when nothing else works, no different from heartbreak. Call me. Please forgive me. Take me back. I was there. I ruined everything. I want a home.

Nora breaks on the line asking for help, on the line about having no strength left. She says nothing. She picks up the script and sinks onto the edge of the bed and reads. Agnes finishes tidying the house and comes to sit beside her, and Nora asks whether she ever told their father about her suicide attempt. Agnes says of course not, then adds that many things are tangled up with their mother, and that in some scenes it feels as if he was present while Nora lived it. Nora answers with something ice cold: but he was not there. You were.

Then she asks the question that guts the room. How did this happen, how did you find your way while I fell apart, how did the same childhood destroy me and leave you untouched? Agnes gives the answer that flattens everyone watching: I had you. You describe yourself as someone who cannot show love, but you were always there for me. The big kids in a house always end up hugging the trees. That is why, in every family, the eldest loves the trees and the youngest loves the fruit.

Right after that, Gustav is found collapsed in front of the house, and we move into the hospital. Nora, alarmed for her father for the first time, rushes down the corridor to his room and strokes his face. She and Agnes step out for coffee, and when they come back he is awake and flirting with a nurse. The two daughters stand there smiling at him, and for the first time all three of them are in the same mood at once.

The ending drops us into the renovation. Crowbars scrape the walls. The red house, which looked like a therapist's office soaked in grief, has gone bone white, like a dental clinic. The fate of the people inside it does not change with the paint. Nora is in the kitchen cooking, playing mother to her nephew Erik. She and the boy are acting in Gustav's film together, she as her own mother and Erik as the young Gustav. Nora confronts the truth that the people who inflict trauma carry trauma of their own. She closes the door, walks to the chair, and her eyes fill. She and her father hold a long look. Everything in the room begs for the embrace. Nora does what passive people do and slides her hands into her back pockets, and Gustav holds her gaze. Then, as the scene goes, he steps toward his grandson Erik and hugs him. Gustav is hugging his own childhood.

I loved this film. I will wait a while and watch it again. All through it, fathers and children who could never manage to hold each other seemed to be waving from the window of a departing train. As a father, I swallowed hard more times than I can count. I tried to understand Gustav, and Nora, and Agnes, and I mostly failed, which I think is the point. When Agnes describes acting in her father's film as a child, she says she felt like the center of the universe back then, and then asks how he could have left. Acting in his film was wonderful, she says. But you were there.

When it ended, a line from Hasan Ali Toptaş's novel *Kuşlar Yasına Gider* came back to me. The same fate runs through a story on the Denizli to Ankara road and through a cold house in Norway: fathers are the lonelinesses written on our foreheads.

Editorial note: Details that remain unconfirmed, including specific production figures and awards outcomes, are presented here as reported rather than settled fact.


Canonical: https://curio.madeda.com/sentimental-value-joachim-trier-s-house-of-grief/