Sisters Agnes (Inga Ibsbotter Lilleaas) and Nora (Renate Reinsve) share a love for the red storybook house of their childhood. When their mother dies, their father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) suddenly stands right outside the door after years of absence. The eccentric director wants to use the house where he grew up for the shoot of his long-awaited, possibly last film. His older daughter Nora is meant to play the main role and finally leave the theater stage, where she is plagued by stage fright that is nerve-wracking for everyone. But Nora declines to embody Gustav’s mother, her grandmother – or even to hold the screenplay in her hands.

Agnes tries to mediate between her unstable sister and her father. As a historian, she is looking into her grandmother’s life at the same time. She was arrested and tortured due to anti-Nazi propaganda before she committed suicide in the family home. But is Gustav’s film really about his mother, whose suffering he had to experience in his youth– or moreso about the sadness surrounding his daughter Nora? This is a question that American actress Rachel, who is spontaneously brought into the family film project, asks herself.

After his audience favorite THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD, Joachim Trier isn’t just back with Renate Reinsve in the main role again, but he has also assembled an international cast with Stellan Skarsgård as Gustav and Elle Fanning as Rachel. The English dialogue is like a foreign body that somehow works when Rachel keeps emphasizing how out of place she feels with her accent in Norway and in the middle of the father-daughter conflict. The relationship between the two sisters offers truly deep insight into the family's wounds. The younger one asks her older sister if she doesn’t want a vase or something else from the house for its “sentimental value.“ Nora wants the vase that Agnes has chosen – and she wants the home from her childhood, before her parent’s separation.

The house tells, guards, and endures the family stories, as Nora had already written in a school essay as a child. And indeed, there are recurring moments that give the impression that the red, picture-perfect house itself is speaking from off-screen. That may sound somewhat old-fashioned, just like the story of the aging film genius trying to win back his estranged daughters. But Trier and his protagonists manage to breathe new life into conflicts that you’ve often seen on screen.

Anna Hantelmann (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy