A hero suffering through a relatable life problem (divorce, growing up, death, mid-life crisis, etc.) tries to solve it by avoidance instead of tackling it head-on. Like most heroes, they choose the wrong path and ultimately need to learn the hard way, for only the experience can offer a solution. The end point of these stories is acceptance of our humanity.

The 3 elements of a RITES OF PASSAGE story are:

1) A life problem: from puberty to midlife to death—these are the universal passages we all understand.
2) A wrong way to attack the mysterious problem, usually a diversion from confronting the pain.
3) A solution that involves acceptance of a hard truth the hero has been fighting, and the knowledge it’s the hero that must change, not the world around them.

Save the Cat! Beat Sheet Analysis for Sentimental Value

Opening Image

An unnamed narrator (Bente Børsum) tells us the story of a young girl’s school assignment, an essay written from the perspective of an inanimate object. The girl, Nora, chooses her home and as we see brief shots, inside and out, of a lovely gabled “Dragestil” house, it takes on the character of a living being, responding to the actions and emotions of those inhabiting it, sharing its memories of the generations that preceded them.

Theme Stated

One close-up in particular captures our attention: a profound crack in the foundation that extends a fissure upwards through every floor of the home. The narrator tells us that this is a “flaw” discovered right after the house was built and Nora wrote that “it was as if the house was sinking, collapsing, only in very slow motion.”

As in any building that has unaddressed structural issues, the generational trauma of this family—left unspoken and undealt with—will eventually cause collapse.

Set-Up

In her fraught thesis world, the adult Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) is a well-known and respected stage actress, but she has more than a few things that need fixing as she suffers from crippling stage fright, is having an affair with her married co-star Jakob (Anders Danielsen Lie), and refers to herself as “only 80% fucked up.”

The image of Nora tearing her costume apart and literally having to be taped together before she can go out on stage is visceral and painful, but she also has her quirky and amusing Save the Cat! moment, requesting that Jakob have sex with her backstage while the opening music is playing to snap her out of her panic attack.

Eventually, Nora makes it onto the stage and, of course, she is brilliant, but it all has an aura of chaos and living on a razor’s edge—wonderful for art, not so great for existing in the real world.

Immediately afterwards, we cut to Nora’s home life for even more angst: she and her sister Agnes’s (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) mother has died and they return to their childhood house (yes, the one with the symbolic crack in the wall) for the funeral.

Catalyst

Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), Nora and Agnes’s estranged father and once-celebrated filmmaker, shows up at the funeral.

Debate

To say that her father’s reappearance is a shock would be an understatement, especially since Nora first hears his voice through the old stove on the second floor while she’s sharing this aural passageway secret from her childhood with her nephew Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven).

She greets Gustav with a hug, but the mind games start quickly as Gustav says he has something to tell her, but can’t tell her at the moment, in the house, so they’ll have to get together after. You can almost hear her teenaged self, moaning, “Seriously, Dad?”

After the funeral lunch, Nora and Agnes tensely discuss Gustav’s abandonment of them after their parents’ divorce, although Agnes is generally more forgiving towards their father, for which Nora chides her. Nora is stunned to discover that Gustav still owns the house; her parents never filed the paperwork to put it in her mother’s name. What in the world is he going to do with it?

Gustav and Nora meet in a café and quickly fall into their old, dysfunctional patterns of communication. Gustav intimates that he’s worried about Nora’s attitude, which makes her bristle. Nora undercuts Gustav’s currently fallow career, making him bristle.

Finally, Gustav gets to the point, handing Nora a film script that he wrote and wants her to play the lead role in because she should be doing more than acting in ancient plays for senior citizens.

Now the gloves come off. Nora drops her politeness and becomes openly hostile, saying that Gustav’s always drunk when he calls her and they can’t even talk to each other in real life so why would she work with him? She walks out angrily, leaving a distressed Gustav behind.

Break into Two

An insert of one of Gustav’s films in a retrospective at the Deauville American Film Festival, showing a very young Agnes in the role of Anna, brings us nicely us into this “film within a film” Act 2.

B Story

It’s all about the fam, as Gustav’s B Story relationship with the famous American actress Rachel Kemp (a lovely and subtle Elle Fanning) is the mirror image of the troubled A Story father-daughter relationship and Nora’s relationship with Agnes bears far more weight than is healthy, although it ultimately leads to that acceptance of hard truth in this Rites of Passage film.

Fun and Games

After being rejected by his daughter, Gustav enters the upside-down world of having a young, talented woman admire him and he eats it up. The headiness of feeling relevant again, to be asked advice about someone’s film career, to be “back in the game,” so to speak, brings out the best and worst in this complex character.

Meanwhile, Nora tries to get back on solid footing in the antithesis world of Gustav being back in her life. Everyone thinks she needs a therapist and Agnes is concerned that Nora might be bottoming out, gently referring to some past incidents of which we are not yet aware. The sisters are cleaning out their mother’s house when they see the starlet Rachel Kemp get out of a limo and discover that she’s going to be replacing Nora in Gustav’s new project.

Nora makes a mad dash from the house while Agnes remains (trying not to, but absolutely fangirling Rachel) and a bit of the mystery of the Borgs is explained. Gustav tells Rachel about the suicide of his main character, followed by the narrator informing us that Gustav’s mother, Karin, joined the resistance in the war and spent two years in prison. After Karin died by suicide, Gustav would visit his Aunt Edith in the summer and eventually took over the house to raise his family, retreating back to Sweden after his divorce and leaving his children.

In wry fashion, Joachim Trier lets us know his take on the state of modern cinema. Gustav feels the frustration of trying to make a film for Netflix, not knowing if it will play in theaters or go straight to the channel, being forced to give interviews to “TikTok trolls,” and having an enthusiastic young cinematographer send him “mood boards.” This subtle shading of the Fun & Games section keeps Sentimental Value from leaning too hard into “sentimental” and gives us an extra hit of humorous “value.”

Meanwhile, Nora is soundly dumped by Jakob even though he’s divorcing his wife and at Erik’s 9th birthday party, Gustav tells Nora that she’s so full of rage, she’ll never be in a relationship. She stares him down as if to say, right, and who’s the cause of that rage?

Midpoint

Nora enters a quiet room and breaks down sobbing. Is this a false defeat, signaling her descent into darkness, or a false victory, Nora actually allowing herself to feel the pain of rejection from the men in her life? Psych! Turns out it’s neither. Or both. We pull back to show that Nora is in a theater, rehearsing for her new show. It seems she can only process her emotions while on stage and the intensity of her breakdown really raises the stakes.

Bad Guys Close In

Gustav goes to see his longtime cinematographer Peter (Lars Väringer) and is shocked at how old and frail he is, obviously unable to manage the handheld camera shots planned for the film. Gustav has to retract his offer to Peter to work on his film and it’s so painful that his internal bad guys flare up; Gustav gets bombed, drunk-calling Nora, who’s also struggling mightily with her depressive tendencies.

Rachel dyes her hair, looking eerily like Nora, but struggles with her role, sensing that doing the film in English is undercutting the power of the script, and—cringe!—trying a Norwegian accent. She also wants to know more about Gustav’s mother, but he keeps saying it’s not about her. However, Agnes is fairly certain it is about her grandmother and goes to the National Archives of Norway to research photo reconstructions of the torture Karin endured.

The pictures make Agnes more tender towards Gustav, who was only seven years old at the time of his mother’s suicide, but that tenderness turns to frustration when he asks Erik to be in his movie without telling her. Agnes finally stands up to Gustav, criticizing him for making her feel like the center of the universe while she was doing his film and then abandoning her afterwards. Unable to understand her father, she finally decides to read his current script, hoping for some clues as to who this infuriating man really is.

All Is Lost

Rachel drops out of the film, knowing instinctively that she’s the wrong person for the part.

Dark Night of the Soul

Gustav gives the middle finger to the house and gets black-out drunk, ending up in the hospital. Nora goes into a deep depression, canceling her performances and not answering Agnes’s calls.

Break into Three

Agnes shows up at Nora’s flat unannounced.

Finale

Agnes takes it upon herself to storm the castle, knowing that neither Nora or Gustav are capable of doing so at this moment. She executes the plan, insisting that Nora read a passage from the script, the same bit that Rachel attempted earlier, which does the double duty of demonstrating Nora’s effortless talent and giving her, and us, a high tower surprise: so moved by the monologue, Nora goes off to read the entire script.

Together, Agnes and Nora execute the new plan, finally digging down deep to look at their judgment of Gustav and the gift of having had each other in all the dark places they shared. Their father is not going to change, but he understands Nora better than she’d ever thought and is clearly reaching out to her the only way he knows how, through his art.

As much as Nora has hated her similarities to Gustav, she now lets herself consider that this may be the circuitous road to the connection she’s always longed for. Maybe, just maybe, it’s enough.

Final Image

The Opening Image was of the Borg home, as is the Final Image; only this time, it’s a film set. It may be impossible to leave the past in the past, but selling a house to let someone else patch up the foundation is a noble effort and one that gives Gustav and Nora the chance to smile at each other with affection and hard-won acceptance.

Synthesis is hard to come by and sometimes can only happen in a good movie, right?

Check out the Beat Sheet Analyses for these other Oscar®-nominated films:

One Battle After Another

Train Dreams

Marty Supreme

Hamnet

Bugonia

Sinners

Weapons

KPop Demon Hunters

Frankenstein