Sentimental Value

Help me! I can’t do this anymore. I knew rewatching this would hit me all the ways it should’ve on first watch. Only after seeing it the first time did it really hit me and ever since I have been constantly thinking of this movie. Here we are and I am utterly speechless and completely heartbroken. Watching this at home in a silent room really aided my experience because I am a mess right now. I had a horrible childhood and I grew up in a really difficult home so you just know every beat in this movie hit me. I don’t want to go into too much detail but things got so bad where I felt very similar to Renate’s character and it was always my little brother which would be the one thing that held me together, to keep going. It can just get so hard sometimes to see a way out that you feel completely trapped. My home was like that for me. It always felt like a horrible place to be where I have so many horrific memories. I have such a strained relationship with my dad too that this was really difficult to watch. I love him so much but he’s a really difficult person and we just don’t communicate very well at all. In every way this film just manages to capture exactly how I feel at so many moments in my life. I relate so much to Renate’s character here and I absolutely adore her performance. The way she captures everything so accurately and beautifully is wonderful. I really do think it might be my favorite performance of the year which I was not expecting. All the performances are obviously wonderful and I wish we could give them all the awards because they certainly deserve them. The script is the best of the year without a doubt and it’s up there with one of the greatest foreign films I have seen. Visually I just love how the camera moves and the cut between scenes makes it feel so special. There are so many funny moments that help to break the tension so well which I loved. I also could not praise Renate Reinsve any more for her performance here, it’s impeccable. A pure and beautiful film that is handled with so much care and delicacy it’s hard not to look at it with admiration. When a film makes you feel like this and connects with you so personally it is hard not to put it into your all time favorites list