When Nora is a child, she is given the assignment to write an essay from the perspective of an object. She chooses her home, an imposing red-gabled Dragestil house which has been passed down her father’s family for generations. Nora writes about what the structure, given the ability to muse, might feel being occupied by the Borgs, two small girls and their parents, Sissel, a therapist, and Gustav Borg, a world-renowned filmmaker.

She details how it registers their presence, as well as the fights between Gustav and Sissel, regarding his absence(s), that would ultimately result in divorce. Nora mentions a fracture (quoted above), a great crack moving up from the foundation of the house, something that her child-self was likely unaware could act as a metaphor for the underlying dysfunction between Gustav and the people—most notably, the women—in his life.

It is this very house that is of primary interest when determining which objects (and matters) in Sentimental Value possess that titular quality, and Joachim Trier’s latest Norwegian-language drama is certainly concerned with the phenomenon of how feelings are imbued into otherwise unfeeling material, continuing to linger, provoke, haunt, etc. well beyond those emotions’ incipience. Other commentators have remarked on how the house is of such distinction that it seems to operate as a character in itself, and this is made almost literally true by Nora’s opening essay-narration; it is also a prime example of how Nora has learned, from a very early age, to compartmentalize and detach—though by film’s end she will learn the extent to which this habit proves ultimately unhealthy. […]