Childhood trauma has many triggers. And, having a baby can stir your earliest anxieties. So, Grace suffers terribly in Lynne Ramsey’s Die My Love. She doesn’t know why. No one does. Not until later. But letting herself love Jackson, moving to an isolated Montana, living in a house where someone died, and being an outsider in a loving family she never had - these feed Grace’s descent into madness …

Agnes and Will didn’t have easy childhoods. In Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. … If not for the hawk, the forest, what her mom taught her, and her biological brother, Bartholomew, Agnes might have shut down to living in the real world and to Will’s love, completely. Bartholomew reminds her of their mother’s wisdom: “To live with our hearts open.” Yet, more loss and misunderstandings can close up your heart again.

No one there. That’s the trauma in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. You can’t feel safe loving someone if there’s no one there as a child—no one who makes you know you have a secure home in their heart. Losing a mom or a dad when you’re little makes you run from love. Live in despair. Walled off. Scared to death that loss is all you’ll find. Just watch Gustav and Nora …