OPINION: A feeling you could never explain

Over the weekend I finally took the time to sit down and finish the rest of the Best Picture nominees by watching both “Sentimental Value” and “The Secret Agent.” They’re two foreign curveballs thrown into a traditionally American-focused industry, but those differences are often what makes storytelling so unique across cultures.

I quite enjoyed “The Secret Agent,” what’s to be the most experimental of this year’s nominees. A slow burn, a flip on expectations of a spy thriller and a chilling reminder of Brazil’s history and association with memory which has gripped generations long after their dictatorship has ended. Whimsical, dark, suddenly violent, I’m somewhat astounded and giddy a movie like this is getting such wide attention.

Yet, I have more to talk about in Norwegian “Sentimental Value,” a deeply tender display of familial bond even when cracked or absent. By the end, I found myself carrying a heavy weight of feeling which took until the next morning for me to finally let loose.

“Sentimental Value” tells a story of two sisters and their father who reconnects with them after they’re both well into adulthood. Played by Stellan Skarsgård in a performance which will be likely to win Best Supporting Actor, fictional famous film director Gustav Borg is planning his first film in over a decade, and with a script from his own heart and a dream to film it in his childhood home, he wants his eldest daughter, Nora, to play the lead role.

With how close “Sentimental Value” is to moviemaking, the outside eye might write off the praise and appeal as just another moment of industry egoism. Instead, the movie dives into the emotional feeling behind creation, what it means to understand and attach to something so personal. And it offers a few cheeky punches at Netflix to boot. (Borg, holding the same energy as a Werner Herzog-like, firmly rebuff’s Netflix’s allergy to theaters and exhausting use of special effects, even when they’re the only funding source for his movie.)

Despite her career as a professional stage actress, Nora refuses the role. How could she accept this role when her father left the family when she was young and has been off in a dream world of fantasy and artistic galavanting? Why was his career so much more important than being a father?

Nora’s sister Agnes, who once starred in one of Gustav’s movies when she was child, has seemingly moved on from the family business. But, her child Erik now catches the eye of Gustav as he teaches the young one how to use his phone’s camera (a charming scene has him playing with camera perspective where the 9 year old bonks a tiny Gustav with a hammer).

Gustav is eternally grumpy about things he feels obligated toward, including his own family. When he talks about his daughter’s show, he can’t help but mention his displeasure with the stage design or the whole business of stage. This is a man who has let the ego of his career completely consume him, so it seems the only way he can connect with his children is through business.

Yet, when Gustav appeals to an American actress, Rachel Kemp (played by a knowing Elle Fanning, essentially a sacrificial lamb in this story) to play the lead once offered to Nora in his dream project, a chain of anxiety from the sisters, Gustav and Rachel grows and scratches old wounds.

The name of the movie, “Sentimental Value,” comes in the movie from a description of a vase in the Borg family home. The vase was purchased at some unknown time, has no real function and could probably be destroyed once the house is properly cleaned out. Yet, the sisters want to keep it.

There are things in our lives we attach our own personal meaning to out of nothing but understanding we’ve lived with them, or we understand the feeling of living without them. All of those feelings, memories, desires, dreams and care can be represented in something singular.

Gustav, for all of his faults (and there quite certainly are many), can’t quite leave his family properly. It would be far easier to do so in his old age where his name offers fame, but he hasn’t completely left. This offering to the sisters, which increasingly becomes clear how the chance for reconnection is waning, isn’t an auteur’s ego trip — it’s a chance to give meaning to an absence.

This is a generational absence, one that extends to Gustav’s mother, who was tortured during the Nazi occupation of Norway and eventually committed suicide when Gustav was a boy. Trauma from both incidents was never a topic of conversation. What pain could one feel, such gargantuanly, mortifyingly hideous pain to make such a decision?

Nora, as an actress, lives off of the weight of expectations. She still gets stage fright before a show and views acting as an escape from her own life. The troubles Nora faces, enough to strike fear and distress, are understood by two people in her life. One who has been with her for ages, and one who’s just started to understand her.

If 2025 in movies was a year about the anxiety of raising one’s offspring into a future which is ever unknown, “Sentimental Value” is the capstone. What lives within oneself no matter how horrible can be scarily seen in our descendants. They will not understand where it comes from. But someone can understand. Someone will know that unexplainable feeling.