Before seeing this film, I already knew Stellan Skarsgård had won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor for it, and that he'd been nominated for the Oscar. So while watching, I kept asking myself: which moment was it that earned him the award? Then I realized that even in the scenes where he has no lines at all, he conveys an extraordinary depth of emotion through his eyes and expressions alone. It's utterly convincing.
If I had to say what kind of story this is, I'd put it this way: zoom out far enough, and it's about intergenerational trauma.
It begins with Gustav's mother. She was taken during the Nazi era and subjected to inhuman treatment. In one scene, Agnes, who is a historian, is going through documents at a library and mentions some of the torture methods used at the time. We can piece together what her grandmother must have endured. But after she came back, she acted as though nothing had happened. She never spoke a word about any of it to her children, her relatives, or her friends. Then one day, when Gustav was seven or eight, he left for school as usual. His mother walked into the small compartment in the back of the room, closed the door, stepped onto a chair, and hanged herself. No one knew why.
He was raised by an aunt after that, and grew into someone who seems perfectly pleasant but is completely incapable of talking about feelings. The moment a conversation turns in that direction, he simply cannot carry it forward. His marriage eventually fell apart. Agnes once said that as a child, she'd appeared in one of her father's films, playing a character called Anna, and that it was the happiest time she'd ever spent with him, because during the shoot, she became the center of his world. But the moment filming wrapped, he pulled away, just like that. She said he always ran hot and cold. That's also why she initially refused to let her own son appear in her father's new film. She didn't want him to go through the same thing.
The two daughters grew up in similar circumstances, yet became very different adults. Agnes was able to build a stable family. Nora was not. She carried a persistent melancholy, struggled with anxiety and depression, and had thoughts of suicide. In her romantic life, she kept hoping for things that were never going to materialize. A male colleague at the theater, for instance: she believed he would be with her once his marriage ended, but that never happened. Her sense of judgment when it came to intimacy was never quite clear.
Nora had a genuine gift for acting, and it became her true passion. What's interesting is that when they were young, it was actually Agnes their father chose to appear in his film, not Nora. Nora gets stage fright before a performance, she gets anxious, but once she's actually up there, facing all those eyes, she says she finds herself deeply enjoying the feeling of surrendering herself, of losing control. She seems to feel truly alive only when she's performing. This struck me as something she shares with her father. Gustav's life, too, revolves around his work and his filmmaking.
The contrast between Agnes and Nora reminded me of something explored in Netflix's Adolescence: even within the same flawed family environment, children with different temperaments can turn out in entirely different ways. At one point the sisters talk about this, and Nora asks Agnes: after everything we went through, how did you manage to build a family? Agnes tells her it was because she had Nora. That Nora took good care of her.
I think Gustav knows, deep down, that Nora is very much like him, that there's a profound bond between them, because they share similar wounds. What he lost was his mother. What Nora lost was him. And that was his doing. I wouldn't say he feels no guilt about it. He just doesn't know how to express it. There's a small moment in the film where he's had a bit to drink at home, picks up the phone to call Nora, but the call is never placed. It just sits there in silence. This has happened many times. And on Nora's end, you notice she never picks up the phone either. Her sister keeps calling and calling, saying, why don't you ever answer, I worry about you.
He doesn't know how to say it. But in the screenplay he wrote, there's a passage that stayed with me long after.
Prayer is not talking to God. It's accepting your own despair, it's throwing yourself on the ground. I had a breakdown, and for the first time I started to pray. I didn't know who I was talking to, but I said out loud: save me, I can't take it anymore, I can't do this alone, I want to find my place.
He wrote those words for his mother, for his daughter, and for himself. Perhaps if a person can find their place, they won't leave.
Maybe that's the real question this film is asking. A mother who no longer knows how to go on living. A father who doesn't know how to sustain a bond with his children. A daughter who doesn't know how to live with herself. It's a question about existence.
Near the end, there is a long take of the scene Nora is performing. She's in a room, seeing off the little boy played by her nephew. It's all done in a single, unbroken shot. But after the boy turns back and then leaves again, when the mother opens the door to that small compartment, the camera shifts. The angle moves from outside the door to inside it. What had been the imagined silhouette of the mother's back becomes a clear view of her face.
Here is how I read that piece of visual language:
Gustav never knew what happened on the other side of that door after it closed. The only thing he knew was that his mother died in there. But in his mind, he had replayed the scene over and over. What his mother was doing alone in the room after he left for school, where she stood, the motion of her walking toward the loft. He replayed all of it, again and again.
The fact that he later wrote this screenplay, made this film, and insisted that Nora play the role probably has everything to do with this. He needed to see the other side of the door, through a film of his own making.
This reading is deeply personal. But I believe that through this scene, he saw what he could not see on that day.
One more detail I want to mention. After the little boy leaves the house, he finds an excuse to go back inside. In the original script, he was going back to get a book. It was later changed to a phone. My guess is that this is actually Gustav's own story. He once went back too. He had a chance, however slim, to change his mother's mind, but he couldn't do anything. For a child, this kind of thing is devastating, because it leaves you with a feeling: was I not important enough? And: could I have changed what happened?
The well-known actress Gustav later cast to play the mother's role could never find her way into the character. She didn't understand why this woman was steeped in such sadness. She kept asking Gustav, what happened to your mother? But Gustav always deflected, always said, this isn't a story about my mother. And yet, the same man would casually remark in another context: oh, that stool? That's the one my mother used to hang herself. A throwaway joke. But the moment someone asks him about his mother in earnest, he retreats. Because there are still things about it he can't make sense of. Maybe he also wants to know whether his mother, before she walked into that compartment, ever cried out in her heart the way the line in the script does: save me. He doesn't know.
As for Nora, when she got the screenplay, she probably didn't think of herself as playing some stand-in for her father's mother from his childhood. She was playing herself. Because her father wrote this script for her. When she read those lines, she was struck by how precisely they echoed what was inside her. It turned out that when her father said "I'm just as sensitive as you are," he meant it. This distant, absent father was, in that moment, closer to her than he'd ever been.
And as I said earlier, Nora has always been someone who feels alive only through performing. So this film became a kind of integration for her. In the past, she'd always felt that spark of life by becoming someone else. But this time, the script she was given allowed her to play herself, to feel alive as herself, and in doing so, to find her own place.
In the final scene, Gustav and Nora look at each other across the set. What they're carrying in that moment is not the same feeling at all. What Gustav intended when he wrote the screenplay, and what Nora felt after stepping into the role, may not be the same thing. They may even be very far apart. But right there, in that exchange of gazes, they both found their place.
This film made me think of Manchester by the Sea, though its ending is slightly more hopeful. What makes it feel so real and so convincing to me is that everyone's temperament is different, everyone's path through growing up is different, everyone's way of coping with trauma is different, everyone's way of communicating is different. So if you're expecting a story that ends with both parties speaking openly, laying everything bare, hearts wide open to each other, that is actually an extraordinarily rare thing. This film gestures toward that possibility with great restraint and delicacy, but it doesn't follow through, because following through isn't easy.
It's not the kind of scene where Nora breaks down in tears saying "I need you so much" and Gustav weeps and apologizes and pours out the story of his mother and his childhood. It's an unconscious circling, a helplessness that comes from communication patterns that have long since hardened into shape. But you can, through something poetic, something spiritual, something literary, something deeply moving, find a way to let go of certain things, rather than through negotiation, debate, judgment, explicit apology, or restitution.
That's why the words "sentimental value" carry so much weight in this film. It may be the kind of thing you need half a lifetime to understand. It's not what Agnes means when she picks up a vase during a move and asks Nora, do you want to keep this, it might have sentimental value. It's not something attached to an object. It's about the relationship between two people. It's about the place each one holds in the other's life. It's about a moment when things finally stop being out of alignment. And to understand that, you may need a very long time. Along the way, you may have already created too many regrets that can never be undone.
So in that final gaze, what did Gustav come to understand? He found an answer, but we don't know what that answer is. We can have our own. Did he finally feel what his mother felt in her last moments, or did he, in that same instant, also touch something about himself he'd never been able to grasp, hidden right there, in the space between his own feelings and his daughter's?