FILM / SENTIMENTAL VALUE

WATCHED:

Sentimental Value, (2025)

WORTH WATCHING

Watched Sentimental Value at Cinema Nova

Sentimental Value is a film about the strange, universal distance between parents and children, and the ordinary ways families fail and find each other again.

Watching it, I kept thinking about how rarely estrangement announces itself. In the film, it is not cruelty or drama that separates the family, but absence, time, and the slow accumulation of unspoken things. The father is gone after the parents’ separation. The daughters grow up anyway. Life fills the space. Only later, when the stakes change, do they come back toward each other.

The relationship between the sisters stayed with me most. Nora’s admission that they grew up in the same family but had different lives, and Agnes’s response, that she had Nora looking after her, landed deeply. It captured something very real about sibling roles, how care shapes one person and costs another. That dynamic felt familiar.

The film is beautifully paced and visually restrained. The house looms throughout, almost insistently, and while its symbolism is never spelled out, it becomes a container for memory, guilt, and inheritance. The opening scene, told from the perspective of the house as if it were alive, sets this up perfectly. It was the moment everyone seemed to agree on as the most beautiful.

There is something reassuring about how universal these feelings are. Different cultures, different families, same patterns. We put things off. We avoid closeness until we are forced into it. And then, briefly, everything else falls away.

FILM, THE FILM REPORTJuliet Sulejmanifilm, film review, at the movies, movie to watch, movie, scandinavian cinema, family dynamics, siblings, memory and grief, houses as memory, emotional distance, contemporary european film, slow cinema, films about family, film report, Joachim TrierComment