HANIA RANI - Sentimental Value OST

Winner of the Grand Prix Speciale della Giuria at the Cannes Film Festival and of the Golden Globe, “Sentimental Value” by Joachim Trier is certainly one of the best films of 2025, as well as one of the Norwegian director's most accomplished and autobiographical works. A work clearly inspired by Ingmar Bergman and his most anguished, psychologically probing films (from the trilogy on the silence of God to “Persona”), “Sentimental Value” features Hania Rani on the soundtrack, a choice that is easy to endorse given the Polish composer's track record.

The film's two-hander story, about the relationship between father and daughter (Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve, respectively), but also about the house — perhaps the true protagonist of the story — is rendered in all its fragility by Hania Rani through a felicitous dialogue between piano and strings, with chamber music that perfectly describes the spaces inhabited by the characters. A minimalism, in the sense of paring the notes down to the bare essentials, that mirrors the struggle of protagonist Nora to find inner peace, made difficult by a complicated relationship with a father who is in some ways extraordinary but was absent for much of her childhood.

This sense of emptiness emerges in a static music that never picks up pace, in suspended strings searching for a melody they will never find, yet which still communicate passion and longing. The house becomes the stage, just as the stage becomes home in Nora's life, the only place of shelter from a life that is hard to fully make sense of. The repeated notes of "The House", this time in the truly minimalist sense of the term, hold the listening experience suspended as if in a still frame that never changes, while the piano searches for modern-classical textures worth remembering ("Riksarkivet", "Agnes").

Music becomes a tool for digging through memory for the traumas that made Nora who she is now, a therapeutic aid for meditation ("Rachel", "Nora"), and when the piano notes merge with the strings (the title track) the score reaches its most emotionally charged moments, moments that underpin Joachim Trier's splendid images and the faces of the two leads — so typical of Scandinavian cinema, the cinema of faces par excellence.

Ride the wave of great music

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25/07/2026