SENTIMENTAL VALUE

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

Sentimental Value, a Norwegian comedy-drama, is a remarkably complex portrait of a family torn apart by grief and brought together through the power of story telling. This is the story of the Borg family consisting of sisters Nora (Reinsve), a Norwegian stage and TV actress and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). The two reunite with their estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a renowned director on the backend of his career, following the death of their mother. Gustav is seeking to make a comeback and offers Nora a role he specifically wrote for her in his autobiographical film. Nora turns it down, but soon discovers he’s given the part to an eager young Hollywood star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning). In navigating her complicated feelings regarding the part, she, Agnes, and Gustav are all forced to confront their frayed familial dynamic.
When we’re shown the childhood home of the Borg sisters, we see an older home with a crack in its foundation. This is to be expected of a house that has aged, but as the story continues to develop, we come to see that the fissures in the Borg house is indicative of the stress fractures in their intrafamily dynamic. The Borgs are a family coming to terms with their frayed relationship, the impetus for which varies for each person. For Nora, her years long struggle with depression and attachment anxiety in her personal relationships, both of which we see play out onscreen, can be traced back to her fraught relationship with her father due to his abandonment of their family for her career. Agnes has been forced to play the strong sister for her sibling who had internalized all of this trauma the most while hiding her own pain. Gustav on the other hand is coming to terms with his own mortality, his own trauma over his mother’s suicide, and the effect that has had on him in addition to his lost time with his daughters.
It’s a multilayered examination of the compounding effect of family trauma and how the pains and sins of our ancestors can reverberate for decades down a family tree.