Sentimental Value (2025): Joachim Trier's Oscar Winner Is a Haunted-House Movie Where the Ghosts Are What Nobody Said

A little girl writes a school essay about her house. She imagines it as a living thing. Is it happier when its rooms are full of people? Does it hurt when somebody slams a window? Then the title appears over a long crack in a plaster wall, and Joachim Trier has told you what kind of movie this is.

Sentimental Value is a haunted-house movie where the ghosts are everything a family never said out loud. Nobody floats down the stairs. Instead, a dead grandmother, a runaway father and two grown daughters keep walking the same hallway toward the same closed door, decade after decade, and the house remembers what they won't. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes, the Oscar for Best International Feature in March (Norway's first ever) and a Golden Globe for Stellan Skarsgård. More to the point, it's the rare family drama that seems to have been quietly listening to yours. It's streaming on Hulu in the U.S. right now.

Why It's a Masterpiece

Right after that title card, we meet the girl from the essay, grown up. Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) is an actress at Oslo's National Theatre, and on opening night she comes apart. She claws at her costume, begs her married co-star and sometime lover Jakob (Anders Danielsen Lie) for sex backstage, and when he refuses, asks him to slap her. When she finally walks on, there are a few sickening seconds of silence before the first line. Slate's Dana Stevens said it plays exactly "like an actor's worst nightmare."

Then her mother dies, and her father comes home. Gustav Borg (Skarsgård) is a once-celebrated director who left for Sweden when the girls were small and hasn't made a film in 15 years. Now he has a comeback script and a request: he wants Nora to play his mother, a resistance fighter tortured by the Nazis who later took her own life in this very house. He wants to shoot it here, too. Nora won't even read it. So Gustav hands the part to a sweet, eager American star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), and brings her into the family home to rehearse.

What makes it extraordinary is how rarely anyone says what they mean. Skarsgård plays Gustav as a man who can charm everyone except the people he owes most; in a café, he can't even fake interest in his daughter's stage career. Reinsve gives Nora a jumpy, funny rage that keeps cracking into something younger. And Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, as Agnes, the younger sister and family peacemaker, quietly steals the film. All four leads were Oscar-nominated, and you can see why in the moments each of them decides not to speak.

Behind the Scenes

The story started close to home. Trier's maternal grandfather, the filmmaker Erik Løchen, was captured while in the Norwegian resistance and held in two camps. Trier told RogerEbert.com that the trauma never left him, and that making films after the war was how he found a place in the world again. Digging through the archives, Trier found a piece of paper documenting his grandfather's imprisonment. That paper became Agnes's trip to the National Archives.

Then there's the voice. The narrator who knows things no character could know is Bente Børsum, who starred in Løchen's first feature around 1960. Trier ran into her at a cheap physiotherapy gym near his home, and they became Sunday workout friends. He had no role to offer, so he offered her the narration, and only then did it click that she had known his grandfather.

The house, found after a year-long search, turned out to be familiar. Production designer Jørgen Stangebye Larsen realized he and Trier had shot Oslo, August 31st there 14 years earlier. That rusty red trim that looks like a mood choice was already on it. The crew shot the present day in the real rooms, then built a full replica in a studio in Drammen and redressed it decade by decade, with LED screens outside the windows showing trees growing and neighboring buildings appearing and vanishing. Trier called it a map of time.

It was all shot on film, over 63 days in the fall of 2024. Cinematographer Kasper Tuxen told Kodak that film was written into Trier's contract, and he gave the camera a personality by painting it with the psychedelic swirl from George Harrison's Stratocaster. Even the composer scouted the location: Hania Rani, scoring her first film, recorded the house's reverb, and Trier said it shaped the echo in her music.

Hidden Details You Might Have Missed

• Two languages at one table. Gustav speaks Swedish; his daughters answer in Norwegian. Editor Olivier Bugge Coutté says that's how Trier talks with his own Danish-speaking father, each in his own language.
• The crack behind the title. The Film Stage's critic spotted that the gash in the wall behind the title echoes the famous poster for Michael Haneke's Caché. Haneke returns when Gustav gives his young grandson DVDs of The Piano Teacher and Gaspar Noé's Irréversible.
• Three faces, one strip of film. Late on, the faces of Nora, Agnes and Gustav dissolve into one another, a nod to Bergman's Persona. It wasn't in the script and it isn't digital: Tuxen shot one actor, rewound the film in the camera and exposed the next face over it.
• "I love you." When Agnes holds Nora after their biggest scene and says she loves her, Nora says it back. Coutté says it was improvised, and the only take out of hours where they said it. Trier kept that scene free of music, so you hear only breathing and clothes.
• Each past in its own film. Gustav's old movie was shot with vintage zooms and a bleach-bypass process; the 1920s and '30s flashbacks were shot on 16mm.

The Director's Genius Moment

Spoiler warning: This section describes the final scene.

In the last scene, Nora has agreed to play her grandmother. In costume, she says goodbye to the boy playing her son (Agnes's son, Erik) and moves toward the room at the end of the hallway, the room where Gustav's mother died. The film has walked us down that corridor so many times that our bodies know the way. Coutté admits that even knowing it's fiction, he still thinks, "No, no, don't go behind that door."

Then the camera pulls back and the walls stop. We're on a soundstage, inside the replica. The real house has been sold, and Gustav's old cinematographer, Peter, is back behind the camera. Tuxen shot it as one long take on a dolly, with key grip Christian Scheibe timing doors to open and close with Reinsve's steps. "It was truly classic cinema," Tuxen told Kodak.

The smartest choice was a deletion. Gustav originally called out directions during the take, and Coutté says it made the scene feel technical, so they cut them. Now it ends without a word: Nora closes the door, the take is over, and father and daughter share one look. The ghost has been given a part to play, and it finally leaves the house.

What the film does to you is simple and hard to shake. It catches the moment when you understand that your difficult parent won't be around forever, and that you'll have to decide what to do about it. Gustav never manages a real apology. What he manages is a script that describes Nora's darkest night, a night nobody ever told him about. That's how she learns he saw her all along. Some parents can only say it sideways, and the film admits that sideways can still count.

Another Way to See It

On a second viewing, watch Agnes, because the film is arguably hers. Nora gets the breakdowns; Agnes does the work. She's a historian, and when the family can't talk, she goes to the National Archives and reads her grandmother's own post-war account of her torture. Then she reads her father's script, understands what it is, and puts it in her sister's hands. As a child she acted in one of Gustav's films and, Trier notes, never wanted to face a camera again. She becomes the one who checks the facts instead.

Trier draws that line himself: the National Theatre, where Nora lives inside fiction, and the National Archives, where a society holds itself to what actually happened. He also repeats an old saying that war trauma takes three generations to let go. Seen this way, Sentimental Value isn't only about a bad dad. It's about how one woman's suffering in the 1940s ended up in her granddaughter's panic attacks, and how it took both an artist and an archivist to set it down.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, especially if you have a parent you love and can't quite talk to, or a sibling who remembers your childhood differently. Watch it with that sibling if you're brave. It runs 133 minutes, mostly in Norwegian and Swedish with some English, and it's funnier than its reputation; the DVD gift alone gets a big laugh. Know going in that suicide sits at the heart of the story.

It has been streaming on Hulu in the U.S. since March 23, 2026, and Criterion released it on 4K UHD and Blu-ray in May. Turn the lights off and the sound up; Trier built those silences to be heard. If you want another father-and-daughter story from the same Oscar night, with far more car chases, read our review of One Battle After Another.

And on a rewatch, go back to the opening essay and listen for that slammed window. The house was telling you how this ends from the very first minute.