Houses That Do Not Forget
A house does not only shelter; it remembers, preserves, and sometimes keeps the wound itself. The house in Joachim Trier’s film Sentimental Value, which received great acclaim at Cannes in 2025 and has recently been screened in Istanbul, is precisely such a presence. Not a backdrop, but a subject that carries witness, conscience, and ache. The fact that this text departs from this film is no coincidence. For questions of trauma and memory do not belong to a single geography; although home, loss, and rupture take different forms in different places, the human responses to them touch one another. Sometimes somebody else’s story becomes a door opening onto what is hidden within us.
While watching the film, a deeply familiar feeling arose in me; as we all know that some houses do not forget easily. There are rooms whose memory does not dissolve, whether they are lived in or left empty. There are places that keep their stories even when they change hands. That is why a house is not merely a backdrop, but an active subject of remembering.
The film follows an aging director who returns to the house of his childhood in order to restage his mother’s tragedy. Yet this is no longer only his story; the past is asked to be carried again through the bodies of his daughters and his grandson. The shadow of the mother, who was tortured for resisting the Nazis and later took her own life, draws in the director who returns to this house years later. His return, ostensibly to sell the house, is in fact a passage into the past.
Here, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s concept of the “crypt,” the inner tomb, comes to mind. According to them, some traumas cannot be narrated directly; language is insufficient, time does not allow it, because the ground for mourning has not been established. When such a ground is missing, trauma that cannot be spoken finds resonance in space. It is kept like an inner tomb within a person, a family, sometimes a community, even within a house. The house in the film is such a crypt: something is buried inside, and it never fully opens.
When trauma cannot be spoken directly, it seeks a form that can carry it. Art often enters at precisely this point. Not to conceal the wound or beautify it, but to open a space where its weight can be born. Yet a question always remains: is this space always transformative, or does it sometimes create new sites of injury by drawing others’ vulnerability into itself?
In the film, the burden inside the house does not remain only at the level of memory. This tension becomes visible. The older daughter refuses to take part in the film. The younger daughter fears what it will do to her son to carry this story. The actress chosen by the director feels that she does not belong to the house’s memory. The house turns into a field of memory that calls those who enter and places demands on them.
At one point, the director seems to abandon the film. The house is sold and becomes a whitened, polished structure, almost without traces. Yet something curious happens: as the house is emptied, the story gains new vitality within the inner worlds of the daughters. They decide to read the script together and take part in the film. But with a difference: the house is no longer directly the “site of the wound.” The film moves into a studio. The crypt is no longer worked within the house but within an in-between space created by art. Perhaps this is the most ethical and bearable way of calling what is buried to the surface: neither fully opening it nor completely repressing it.
These scenes made me think of this: for Armenians, artistic production is often more than an aesthetic experience. At times, it becomes a space for carefully encountering burdens and inner tombs that cannot be spoken of directly. Not every wound should be opened; some should not. Some crypts are opened only symbolically. This is where what Freud called the “uncanny” appears: what is familiar returns with a disturbing face. As in Biberyan’s story Kantsı-Treasure, sometimes it is best to close a grave halfway after it has begun to open. Some wounds exist not to be fully exposed, but only to become visible up to a certain point. Because opening everything does not always heal; sometimes it multiplies fragility and wounds again. What we know is that there is always a story left behind. The question is how, by whom, and with what ethical distance that story is told.
Perhaps what Sentimental Value wants to say is this: remembering is sometimes necessary, but it is not always enough. As in Biberyan’s work, some houses and some stories carry more than people can bear. And yet we cannot entirely turn away from them. Perhaps by daring to remain at that uncanny threshold, neither fully opening nor completely closing… Because sometimes we come closest to truth precisely at that edge, where the grave is no longer fully sealed but not entirely opened either. And standing at this edge asks not only how we look at the film, but how we approach our own stories as well.
