‘Sentimental Value’ review: Repairing the past isn’t cheap

Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value delivers rich performances and emotional nuance in a story of family wounds, art, and imperfect healing.

Sentimental Value turns the stuff of cozy family drama—sisters, a creaking old house, a prodigal artist dad—into something stranger and more ambivalent. That is, a film about the limits of apology, the seductions of autobiography, and how easily art can be used to look at your life instead of actually living it. It’s often gorgeous, impeccably acted, full of ideas, and then some. It’s also, at times, a little too in love with its own reflection.

Joachim Trier’s latest unfolds over two-plus hours with the measured confidence of a filmmaker who’s very aware you’ll follow him anywhere after The Worst Person in the World. Once again, we’re in Oslo, once again, we’re in the orbit of Renate Reinsve, and once again, the movie is preoccupied with people trying—and failing—to find a language for their inner lives. But where Worst Person locked us to a single, messy heroine, Sentimental Value is deliberately more sprawling. It’s a polyphonic family chronicle that keeps circling back to the same house and the fractures it quietly recorded over decades.

“You two are the best thing that’s happened to me.”

We begin with panic. Stage actress Nora Borg (Reinsve) is midway through a minor breakdown in the wings, jittering like she’ll do anything to avoid walking on. When she finally steps into the light, she detonates the room. Trier has always loved this tension between paralysis and performance. Where he builds a whole film around a woman who can access her feelings only when she’s pretending to be someone else. Offstage, Nora is brittle, restless, the kind of person who processes grief by transmuting it into craft. Onstage, she’s incandescent.

“My father is a…very difficult person.”

Her younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) is the counterpoint. She’s a quiet diplomat anchored by a husband and young son, the one who stayed home and did the work nobody applauds. However, they’ve been shaped by the same absence. Their father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), a once-revered director who walked out on his family years ago, is now a rumor that occasionally trends in French retrospectives. The sisters were raised by their mother Sissel in the old family house, which the film gradually reveals as less a setting than an accomplice. Time has saturated its very walls with unprocessed hurt and staircases worn by generations of Borgs pacing themselves into exhaustion.

Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt literalize that idea in one of the film’s loveliest devices: a childhood essay Nora wrote at twelve. In it, she imagines the house as a living creature watching its inhabitants age, suffer, and eventually leave. These flashbacks, narrated in voiceover, give Sentimental Value a gently haunted texture. Time folds in on itself as a grown Nora crosses the same hallway we just saw her younger self describe. Agnes wipes down a kitchen table that once belonged to another woman’s grief.

The film occasionally hops between eras—the 30s, the sisters’ childhood, the messy present—with little fanfare. And Kasper Tuxen’s camera keeps finding the same shafts of Oslo light hitting those windows in slightly different ways. The house keeps a tally even when the people inside it insist they’ve moved on.

“You can’t pretend he’s not here.”

Into this fragile equilibrium storms Gustav, gate-crashing Sissel’s memorial with a mix of charm and obliviousness Skarsgård can do in his sleep but thankfully does not. He arrives not just with flowers and regrets but with a script. It’s an autobiographical comeback project that recasts his abandonment as film festival content. He wants Nora to play a thinly veiled version of her own mother. Maybe, he insists, this will be their way of working through the past together. It’s reconciliation reimagined as collaboration, apology as casting offer. The sort of “perfect story” you can easily imagine on a set of press notes.

Nora, understandably, recoils. Part of her fury is moral. Why should she help him turn their wounds into his third-act redemption? But part of it is also scarier. She recognizes herself in him. His artistic narcissism rhymes with her own instinct to cannibalize life for performance. Reinsve plays this with a muted volatility, where you can feel the refusal as an act of self-preservation she doesn’t entirely understand.

When Nora says no, Gustav simply recasts the role. In sweeps Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), an American movie star fleeing her own artistic dead-end. She’s the sort of actor who has been famous so long she’s started to treat serious cinema like she’s a tourist in it. She meets Gustav at a French festival during a retrospective of his earlier work. We see rows of his younger self projected larger than life as he tries to convince someone, anyone, he still matters. Rachel sees in him the romantic figure of the European auteur. He sees in her a new chance at financing.

“The more that I study her, the more lost I feel trying to be her.”

The dynamic that follows is one of the film’s sharpest pleasures. Fanning plays Rachel as someone whose default mode is charm but whose eyes are always working. She easily clocks the dysfunction she’s walked into. At first the idea of playing this fictionalized Norwegian mother feels like prestige cosplay, as she slowly realizes she’s stepped into an ongoing family argument she can’t fully decode. Which means she’s doomed to hitting marks in a house that doesn’t belong to her and speaking lines written by a man who barely speaks to his daughters. She’s a guest and an intruder, a collaborator and a proxy.

Meanwhile, Agnes does what Agnes always does: quietly holds everything together. While Gustav and Nora circle one another in a dance of avoidance and tentative thaw, she’s the one sorting through Sissel’s archives, uncovering old letters and recordings that sketch out a longer history of Borg dysfunction.

“We can’t really talk.”

Lilleaas is the film’s not-so-secret weapon in this way. Because it’s a movie full of actors playing actors, and she’s the one person who seems allergic to performance. Her scenes, often tucked into the margins, give Sentimental Value the ache of ordinary endurance. The exhaustion of being the “responsible one” in a family that mistakes your self-erasure for stability.

All of this plays out with Trier’s usual delicacy. He’s a director of faces and thresholds, as his best scenes are often just people hesitating in doorways, desperately trying to say what they mean and disappointing themselves instead. Here he extends that interest to a larger ensemble, cutting between the sisters, their father, Rachel, and even the house itself as it witnesses yet another generational handoff of unfinished business.

The visual scheme is lush without tipping into sentimentality. Such as golden afternoon light flooding the living room during a rare moment of connection, the murky blue of Oslo winter pressing against the glass when conversations freeze over. Hania Rani’s score and the carefully chosen needle drops—Terry Callier, Labi Siffre—wrap the whole thing in a soft melancholy, like a playlist someone made for a road trip that never happened.

“I think it’s time you and I sat down and had a proper talk.”

If all of this sounds a little overwhelming, that’s because it sometimes is. Sentimental Value is a film of layers. It carries films within films, memories within memories, scenes that rhyme across decades. And Trier clearly delights in stacking them. But for all its complexity, the movie is oddly reluctant to sharpen its own emotional arguments. It begins with a question: what do parents owe their children, and what do children owe their parents in return? And it absolutely arrives at a moment of raw, shattering catharsis near the end, a scene so full-bodied and earned you might briefly forget how long it took to get there.

The problem is everything in between. The stretches where the film feels like it’s idling in finely observed but familiar beats, circling the same ideas of inherited grief and artistic atonement without quite deepening them. Trier and Vogt are too smart to offer a simple verdict on Gustav. Yet there are subplots—about Agnes’s own submerged anger, about Rachel’s precarious relationship to her image, about the siblings’ diverging versions of childhood—that feel like they’re waiting for a payoff that never fully arrives. You can feel the intention, but occasionally the film’s detachment curdles into distance. It’s precise more often than it is piercing.

“Why didn’t our childhood ruin you?”

What keeps Sentimental Value compelling even when it’s spinning its wheels are the performances. Reinsve, again, proves she’s one of the most riveting dramatic actors working right now, especially when playing women who are articulate in every register except self-knowledge. Her Nora is prickly and self-absorbed, yet acutely alive. You always feel the buzzing noise under her decisions.

Skarsgård imbues Gustav with a sadness that never quite redeems him. He’s as capable of gifting his grandson DVDs of  Irreversible and The Piano Teacher as a “birthday gift” as he is of weeping over his daughters’ pain. Fanning threads the needle between clueless outsider and empathetic observer. And Lilleaas walks away with half the movie, suggesting an entire inner life in the way Agnes sacrifices yet another afternoon to manage everyone else’s crises.

“I know it’s been hard for you. I recognize myself in you.”

By the time the credits roll, Sentimental Value has done something quietly sophisticated. It has turned the idea of “making peace” into a moving target. Gustav’s film reaches its end point, of course. Apologies are attempted, some accepted, others not. The house stands, slightly altered, ready to absorb the next generation’s dramas.

We arrive at an ending that is both emotionally emphatic and, in a strange way, incomplete. Less a grand reckoning than a temporary ceasefire. The film has asked whether art can function as a form of reconciliation, and its answer, if it has one, is resistant. A movie can help you see your life differently. It cannot live it for you.

The bottom line.

In that sense, the title cuts both ways. Sentimental value itself is full of things to treasure. Exquisite craft, a handful of indelible scenes, a cast working at the top of their game. I liked it a lot. I wished, a little selfishly, that the emotions it teased and the ideas it raised had been developed with the same rigor as its structure and surfaces. For all its beauty, there’s a faint sense of a film that holds itself at arm’s length. Afraid that, if it dug too deep, something in this precariously constructed house might finally collapse.

Maybe that’s the last, unresolved question Trier leaves us with. When you turn your family into material, are you honoring them, or just finding another way to keep them on the page and off the phone?

Sentimental Value is now playing in limited release. Watch the trailer here.

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Images courtesy of NEON.