The film opens on a family home so laden with memories it seems to breathe (and occasionally creak in protest), immediately anchoring us in an atmosphere of lingering echoes. Nora Borg, a celebrated Oslo stage actress, stands frozen in her costume—panic attacks her unseen co-star—while outside, the world demands performance.

Her estranged father, Gustav Borg, returns not with flowers or apologies but with a screenplay drawn from the very walls that witnessed his own mother’s final act. It’s therapy by proxy—an auteur’s attempt to excavate buried truths through celluloid rather than confession.

That ancestral mansion, all scarlet timber and sagging floors, serves as both set and symbol: a repository of joy and despair, its very architecture split down the middle like a family portrait gone awry.

When Nora rejects her father’s offer, an American starlet, Rachel Kemp, slides into the vacant role—hair...