How Sentimental Value helped me better understand my daddy issues

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Let’s start from the beginning. My father is no longer alive, and my parents were not married for most of my life. That does not mean my relationship with my father falls into those classic distant scenarios inspired by excessive drama and dark inexperience that tend to exaggerate the bleak portrayal of father figures. Despite a complex relationship with his parents, a desperate struggle with gambling addiction, difficulties in finding understanding in his surroundings, and the hiding and suppression of emotions, ah yes, that famous dad behavior, things with my father were, essentially, fine. You see the irony, I hope. And you also understand that the sums of money I have spent on therapy by now equal a housing loan. All in all, no film or series had previously taken me back too intensely to that part of my brain where I had locked away all those realizations about my relationship with my father. Then I watched Sentimental Value by Joachim Trier on Apple TV. It may not have been the experience of a grand movie theater, but it gave me plenty of space, in my bed, that extremely tense place ideal for realization, disintegration, and reassembly, to absorb all the small details that would later bore into my brain like a little worm that very deliberately crawled into my carelessly accessible head and decided to stay there.

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The film follows an emotionally turbulent actress, Nora, the magical Renate Reinsve, also the lead in one of my favorite films, The Worst Person in the World, and her calmer younger sister Agnes, the enchanting Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who have both just lost their mother. There is also Gustav, the self-assured Stellan Skarsgård, their estranged father, who unexpectedly appears in the family home shortly after the funeral. Nora is immediately suspicious. He must want something, she thinks. Why else would he come back? It turns out he really does want something. He is a director who has taken a long break from filmmaking but is now ready to start work on a new project. He has written a script and tells Nora that he would like her to play the lead. He tells her he is doing her a favor, that the roles she has played so far in her career were not worthy of her, but that this one would be. Nora rejects the offer to his face. Disappointed but still determined to move forward, he casts a big Hollywood star, Rachel, played by Elle Fanning, in the role instead. When Nora finds out, she seethes with anger and slowly begins to unravel.

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That is where all the “drama” of this film begins, but for the rest you will have to watch it yourself and deal with your own daddy issues, okay?

This story has absolutely nothing to do with my personal story, but simple identification is not what led me to connect with it on a deeper level. I think only if you are Sofia Coppola can you feel this film as something personally bone-deep. What resonated with me was how difficult Nora’s conversation with her father is, how much silence exists between them, how much is understood only through looks, movements, and reactions shaped by years of knowing someone’s behavior, mistrust in them, and the attempt to defend yourself from the same pattern without getting hurt. How much it takes to still try to understand another perspective, to see what that person is going through, without reacting with overwhelming anger, frustration, or self-destructiveness. A familiar feeling? I am sure it is.

Photo: Kasper Tuxen Andersen

For me, this resonated especially because at one point the phenomenon of daddy issues is clearly shown as something that is not just a well-known and endlessly inspiring psychological stereotype in film, but a real, complex set of experiences that shapes relationships, boundaries, trust, and self-worth. Trier’s film also reminded me how misogynistic the stigma attached to this phenomenon is, as if an emotional struggle with a father or father figure is automatically reduced to a “women’s issue,” while no one questions how the same patterns affect all members of a family, men and women alike. In Nora and Gustav, I saw reflections of all those subtle dynamics I absorbed in my own way over the years, how we deal with expectations, how we interpret absence or presence, how we try not to repeat patterns and yet still understand the other side. And that reminds me of something we often forget: from the same family, different people can have completely different experiences and strategies for surviving those same situations. Some find strength in working on themselves independently, some in therapy, some in the support of siblings or other family members. Sometimes it is simply our mental makeup or the expectations others place on us that shape the way we deal with the past.

I do not know if that is what makes Sentimental Value so important, but I do know that this film transcended the framework of an introspective mirror of a cinematic world and became a tool for recognizing how different paths through the same family circumstances can be shaped and how we carry them with us. And my daddy issues? They are definitely something I can now proudly accept as a part of myself. Alongside that proud acceptance, there is also a constant humor that perfectly accompanies what daddy issues are for me, but on my terms, on my territory, and certainly at the expense of my own dead dad. Too soon? Okay, I will stop, maybe there are those who have not yet reached even their first million spent on therapy. Don’t worry, you will get there.