Sentimental Value – Film Review

Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value might be his most emotionally layered, morally thorny, and formally assured film to date, a culmination of the themes that have pulsed through his Oslo trilogy and his collaborations with co-writer Eskil Vogt. Here, he crafts a comedy-drama that is as achingly intimate as it is self-reflexive, exploring the complicated rhythms of forgiveness, the blur between life and art, and what remains after years of unspoken pain calcify into habit. The result is a deeply textured portrait of a fractured family tied together by grief, ego, creative ambition, and a longing for connection that feels crushingly human.

The film follows Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), an aging auteur whose name once carried prestige but now echoes only faintly in cinephile circles. Following the death of his former wife Sissel, Gustav reappears in the lives of his estranged daughters—driven stage actress Nora (Renate Reinsve) and practical, grounded Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). He arrives not with tenderness or apology, but with a plan. He has written a deeply personal screenplay about his own mother, a woman scarred by Nazi torture and lost to suicide in the family’s Norwegian home decades earlier. In his mind, this film will redeem him—artistically, emotionally, historically. Whether his daughters are healed or cracked further in the process seems secondary.

This setup could easily have become a stalking horse for melodrama, but Trier and Vogt approach it with razor-sharp nuance and a perceptive, often cutting wit. Nora’s refusal to play the role — and Gustav’s decision to instead cast a Hollywood actress, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) — becomes the film’s central dramatic and comedic engine. Rachel’s wide-eyed admiration for Gustav, her curiosity about European high art filmmaking, and her near-comical distance from the Borg family’s pain inject the film with a dry, uncomfortable humor. Fanning plays the role with disarming sincerity, skirting parody while illuminating Rachel’s own complexities: ambition, insecurity, and a desire to belong to a story that isn’t hers.

The sibling dynamic between Nora and Agnes is equally compelling. Reinsve — already one of Europe’s most magnetic performers since The Worst Person in the World — charts Nora’s internal conflict with a subtle volatility. Nora is brilliant but brittle, terrified of repeating the cycle of abandonment while simultaneously living in the very patterns her father modeled. Lilleaas gives Agnes a grounded, empathetic presence, anchoring the film with quiet heartbreak. Agnes, having chosen domestic stability, feels overlooked in a family that worships genius and pain as currency. Her resentment is quiet but palpable, making her vulnerable moments hit with devastating force.

Skarsgård delivers a late-career performance nothing short of towering. His Gustav is maddening yet sympathetic — a man whose self-belief masks profound insecurity, and whose arrogance is a defense mechanism against unresolved generational trauma. There are flashes of rage, delusion, charm, and childish fragility. Trier wisely refuses to turn Gustav into a villain or a saint; he is a man who genuinely wants reconciliation but cannot escape the gravitational pull of ego and artistry. His attempts at bonding — ill-timed grand gestures, awkward confessions, fumbling apologies — oscillate between comic misfires and painful sincerity.

The film’s central metaphor — art as a battlefield for emotional redemption — fits Trier’s filmography, but Sentimental Value deepens his examination. The scenes on Gustav’s film set crackle with tension and humor. Rachel rehearsing lines of trauma she doesn’t fully understand while Nora watches, wounded; Gustav insisting he is “honoring truth” while bending facts to fit narrative structure; the quiet contempt of crew members who see through his myth-making — these details expose the absurdity and cruelty that can lurk in artistic legacy-building. Trier’s direction walks the tightrope between empathy and satire, never tipping into cynicism even as he interrogates vanity and exploitation.

Visually, the film is patient and atmospheric. The Borg family home in Norway — wood creaking beneath decades of grief, surrounded by silent snow and ominous stillness — becomes a character unto itself. Cinematographer Kasper Tuxen bathes the environment in soft light, memory-blurred textures, and ghostly quiet. The camera lingers on the smallest physical gestures — hands brushing against old walls, the pause before a door opens — capturing the weight of living in spaces where history breathes through every doorway. The structure balances conventional narrative warmth with Trier’s signature elliptical storytelling, occasionally slipping into dreamlike fragments and memory slivers that evoke the past without ever fully revealing it.

The screenplay is rich with insight. Conversations unfold like duels, filled with subtle jabs, suppressed truths, and moments of blunt emotional exposure. Yet the film is unexpectedly funny, its humor arising from awkward pauses, mismatched expectations, and the absurdities of wounded people trying to behave normally. Trier understands that families communicate as much through silence and misinterpreted gestures as through words. When catharsis arrives — not in a single climactic explosion but through small, tentative acts of vulnerability — it feels earned.

If there is a critique, it lies in the film’s occasional indulgence in thematic echo, with certain motifs repeated slightly more than necessary. Yet one could argue that repetition suits a story about cycles — inherited, self-perpetuated, painstakingly unlearned. Viewers expecting clean resolution may find the ending elliptical, but the film’s refusal to simplify complex emotional truths reinforces its maturity.

Ultimately, Sentimental Value is a triumph of emotional intelligence and cinematic precision. It is tender without sentimentality, painful without cruelty, humorous without flippancy. Trier and Vogt have crafted a film about reconciliation that resists easy redemption, aiming instead for something messier and truer: the slow work of rebuilding trust, the humility of acknowledging harm, and the understanding that love does not erase the past — but can soften its edges.

Anchored by extraordinary performances and guided by Trier’s humane, searching direction, the film lingers long after its final frame. It feels lived-in, bruised, hopeful, and honest — a cinematic experience that trusts audiences to sit with discomfort and beauty in equal measure.