Sentimental Value

Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value opens with a deceptively simple conceit: a daughter, a father, and a house that has seen more than either care to remember. Yet beneath its elegant calm lies an excavation of familial silence, artistic vanity, and the quiet endurance of love. The Norwegian director’s sixth feature is, on its surface, a chamber drama about an actress and her filmmaker father; beneath, it is a meditation on how the past persists — in our art, in our homes, and in the fault lines of our relationships.

Renate Reinsve, in a performance of striking fragility and poise, plays Nora, a stage actress whose career masks profound unease. Her estranged father Gustav, embodied with weathered grace by Stellan Skarsgård, returns after decades of absence, proposing that she star in his latest film — a semi-autobiographical work that would force her to relive the very wounds his departure caused. The offer is both a plea for reconciliation and an act of self-absorption, a pattern typical of Gustav, whose devotion to cinema has long outrun his devotion to family.

The Borg family home becomes the film’s most eloquent character: a space of accumulated sorrow, its creaking floors and hairline cracks suggesting that trauma, like moisture, seeps into the walls and never quite leaves. Trier literalizes this through Nora’s childhood essay, in which she imagined the house as a living being capable of pain. The metaphor deepens as the film unfolds — generations of grief and artistic ambition reverberate through its rooms like old echoes.

Trier, reuniting with co-writer Eskil Vogt, shapes this material with his characteristic restraint. His cinema has always dwelt in the liminal space between intellect and emotion, but here he allows sentiment to take precedence over irony. Sentimental Value has moments of levity — a mordant joke about Gustav gifting his grandson Irréversible at a birthday party is particularly telling — yet the humour arises from human fallibility rather than detachment. It is Trier’s warmest and most compassionate film, though also one of his saddest.

Reinsve’s portrayal of Nora, perpetually on the verge of collapse, recalls the raw immediacy of her Cannes-winning turn in The Worst Person in the World, yet this role demands greater interiority. She communicates despair through stillness as much as speech; her eyes register centuries of disappointment. Opposite her, Skarsgård tempers Gustav’s egotism with an almost childlike hope that art might heal what time has corroded. Their scenes together, charged with decades of unspoken grievance, are painful in their honesty.

Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, as the younger sister Agnes, provides the film’s moral centre — a figure of quiet resilience who has accepted the past without succumbing to it. A single late-night conversation between the sisters, rendered in the soft half-light of their mother’s house, distills the film’s essence: the recognition that forgiveness, if it comes at all, comes through understanding rather than absolution.

Cinematographer Kasper Tuxen frames these lives with painterly restraint — autumnal light filtering through Oslo’s interiors, faces half-obscured by reflection — while Hania Rani’s spare piano motifs trace the melancholy rhythm of memory. Even the film’s structure, looping between present grief and ancestral flashbacks, feels like an act of remembrance: history repeating itself through different faces.

The introduction of Elle Fanning as Rachel, the American actress cast to replace Nora in Gustav’s film, risks imbalance but ultimately enriches the meta-cinematic play. Her radiant openness throws into relief the Nordic austerity surrounding her; she becomes both proxy and mirror, a figure of the daughter Gustav wishes he could understand.

At 133 minutes, Sentimental Value demands patience. Its pacing mirrors the process of emotional excavation: slow, deliberate, occasionally exhausting, but cumulatively profound. Trier resists melodrama, preferring the long ache of recognition to the quick catharsis of tears. The result is a film that believes, earnestly but without sentimentality, in the possibility of tenderness amid ruin.

“Tenderness is the new punk,” Trier quipped at Cannes — an aphorism that lingers like a moral. Sentimental Value embodies that belief. It is a film about artistic inheritance, emotional repair, and the porous boundary between creation and confession. Though not without its detachment — its emotional temperature sometimes cools when it most needs warmth — the work’s sincerity redeems its restraint.

For all its sorrow, Sentimental Value is finally hopeful. It suggests that while the structures we inherit — familial, emotional, architectural — may be cracked, they can still shelter us if we learn to inhabit them with care. In the end, Trier offers no grand reconciliation, only the faint, persistent murmur of love that survives misunderstanding.