‘Sentimental Value’ Review: Joachim Trier Constructs a Searing, Tender Family Drama [A] Cannes

Growing up in an old house means getting used to its little idiosyncrasies, just as you would with any other family member. It’s the one doorknob that’s always been a bit wonky or the cupboard door that just won’t stay closed. It’s getting scared as a child when you hear a creak in a floorboard upstairs, and your mom telling you that the house just has to let it out sometimes. Joachim Trier’s masterful new film, Sentimental Value, opens with a gorgeous montage that brings a Victorian home to life in all of its glory, exploring the nooks and crannies and the people that have haunted it for generations. Our narrator (Bente Børsum) recalls a time when a 6th-grade Nora Borg wrote an essay personifying this home, her family’s home in Oslo, recounting it with the beauty and sadness of a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. In the story, the house watches Nora grow up, running down the halls, listening through the vents of an old stove as her parents fight and eventually separate. Most importantly, the house pays close attention to how Nora cared for and protected her younger sister, Agnes, introducing her to moments of joy and comforting her through the sadness. Sentimental Value occupies that space, oscillating between moments of warmth and grief to explore residual family trauma and art’s power to inspire reconciliation. 

Much like her hesitancy to select her own personal essay as her audition monologue (she opted for Chekhov instead), Nora (Renate Reinsve) is incredibly unsure of herself as an adult. She’s about to perform in an avant-garde theater production, complete with bold, intense set design and comical, ominous classical music cues that most audiences will recognize from The Shining. She has crippling stage fright, though, and will do just about anything but go onstage. It’s the perfect introduction to Nora as a character and the film’s specific comic flourishes and sense of humor. Despite all of her protestations, she makes it onstage and is incredible. For Nora, acting allows her to access the emotions she finds difficult to express in her everyday life, channeling her anxiety and grief into her performances. That sadness is felt even more deeply when Nora’s mother passes away. She and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) are even more surprised when their estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), comes to the house for the repast. Gustav is a renowned filmmaker who, over the years, used his art as an excuse to leave his wife and daughters behind. Despite not being in the home for several years, though, his charm and charisma allow him to navigate the space with ease. Gustav’s arrival also reveals differences between the sisters as adults. Agnes, with her sensible attitude and penchant for peacemaking, naturally gets along much better with Gustav. Nora, on the other hand, actively avoids him and, when given the chance, reminds him that he decided to leave the girls and their mother. In Sentimental Value, grief isn’t just something that the sisters share in the wake of their mother’s death, but also an energy that their family home has held onto. Much like another film in the Cannes competition this year, Sound of Falling, Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt (The Worst Person in the World) seem interested in how grief and emotional experiences are inherited and shared, with the family home as both witness to and vessel for decades of experiences.

It’s been fifteen years since Gustav made his last film and he’s been a little listless. Inspiration strikes, though, and he creates a new, very personal script that he has to share with Nora. As he describes the project to her, he says, “The film is about a young woman, a mother who…” deciding not to finish his thought. Instead of describing the character further, he simply tells her he’s written the role specifically for her and wants to shoot the film in their family home. It’s a delicate, loose thread that Trier and Vogt carefully weave throughout the film, blurring the line between personal history and creative construct and intersecting the experiences of the Borg women across generations. When they choose to reveal what lies at the other end of that ellipsis, it’s all the more heartbreaking. Nora rejects his offer outright. If she can’t communicate with him in real life, how is she supposed to work alongside him on something so personal? Gustav has been an absent father for most of her life, so the timing of the project feels suspect both for her and the audience. Trier and Vogt wisely don’t make Gustav’s motivations for creating this role for Nora crystal clear. Does he sincerely hope he and Nora can find forgiveness through their art? Does he, like many other filmmakers, know that a film with a personal narrative will be industry and audience catnip? Instead of answering these questions outright, Trier and Vogt opt to reveal Gustav’s personal connections to the character and to his mother and daughter in stunning vignettes and powerful revelations, illustrating exactly why her casting is so important to him. 

Gustav shelves the project until he meets American starlet Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) at a retrospective for his films in France. Rachel is moved by his work, and like Gustav, is searching for a way to make her own career more meaningful. Despite her popularity, she’s had a string of duds and is looking for something with a bit of weight and truth to it. The two connect and suddenly, his film has a movie star attached, a streaming distribution deal with Netflix (one of the film’s best jokes), and a script in English to accommodate its American lead. It doesn’t really feel like the film Gustav envisioned anymore, and eventually, it doesn’t feel that way for Rachel either. Fanning has an incredibly tricky role and effortlessly creates a character who, like the members of the Borg family, is searching for something new, yet feels a bit unmoored in her current situation. On a deeper level, she fits in, yet she’s entirely wrong for the role. Fanning has to walk a bit of a tightrope here in playing a character who is miscast without actually being miscast herself, and her performance adds a rich layer to the film’s metatextual structure. Trier and Vogt also don’t fall into lazy cliches in writing Rachel. She’s not an archetype and is instead enthusiastic, eager, and thoughtful about Gustav’s artistic intent and how she fits into their fractured family portrait. When Rachel decides to stalk Nora on Instagram and dye her hair brown to match her, there aren’t any sinister motivations to be found. Rachel doesn’t want to replace Nora; she simply wants to understand her to find the character. Sentimental Value is laced with that same type of tenderness and understanding, challenging us to view art and the business of making it through a softer lens. 

The brilliance of Trier and Vogt’s sprawling, yet intimate script is that Gustav and Nora are on parallel tracks, working to avoid each other for most of the film. Skarsgård and Reinsve play off each other beautifully, creating an emotional charge and a volatility that can only be found when people in broken relationships are forced to share a space. Reinsve captured audiences (and the Cannes Jury) with her ebullient, lived-in performance in The Worst Person in the World, perfectly depicting her character Julie’s spontaneity and selfishness, while personifying the period of intense change that typically comes in your late twenties. In Sentimental Value, Reinsve imbues Nora with an even richer, deeper sense of loneliness, making it feel like a sister film. She isn’t flailing because she isn’t sure what she wants; she’s struggling to confront who she is and to find her own identity. She’s doing well in her career, but she hasn’t settled down in the way that her sister and her peers have started to, and is instead sleeping with a married man in her acting troupe (Anders Danielsen Lie returning). “I know myself so well that I don’t need therapy,” she says to Agnes, with a bit of humor masking a twinge of sadness; an independence that can so quickly shift to isolation. In a particularly biting scene, Gustav (a nasty drunk) reminds Nora that when her mother Sissel was her age, she already had two children, and that her emotions won’t be as honest in her acting without them. The fact that the comment is made at her nephew’s birthday party next to Agnes and her husband makes it all the more cutting, the type of mean-spirited knife that only a family member would pierce you with. It’s a painful moment, but one of the many scenes showcasing the film’s quiet devastation and the power of Skarsgård and Reinsve together on screen. 

Even though Sentimental Value has a slightly American essence compared to Trier’s previous films (Cory Michael Smith and Catherine Cohen are also briefly featured as Rachel’s publicists), the look and feel of the film is strikingly Scandinavian, from specific comedic references to filmmakers like Lasse Hallström in the script to cinematographer Kasper Tuxen’s crisp, bright visuals of Oslo and the Borg family home. The film’s visual flourishes and familial focus feel akin to the films of Ingmar Bergman, if only Bergman’s films had a little more capacity for hope. Stellan Skarsgård, an actor whose career spans Scandinavian and Hollywood films, is also the perfect fit for Gustav. On paper, a gregarious filmmaker who is frequently drunk sounds like it could be an over-the-top, showy role, but Skarsgård’s performance is incredibly nuanced. In one of the film’s funniest moments, he gifts Agnes’ nine-year-old son Erik two comically inappropriate DVDs for his birthday: Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. “This is a film that will help you understand women,” he tells the boy. These comedic scenes are further complimented by sequences of quiet drama. Later, as Gustav shares the story of how his mother Karin (Vilde Søyland) was imprisoned for being a part of the Resistance during World War II, the heartbreak he feels from her experience and his confusion over her suicide linger on his face. It’s a beautiful performance and the best of his career. 

The film’s pièce de résistance comes after Agnes devours her father’s script, knowing that Nora is the perfect fit for the role. It seems Gustav has understood Nora in a way that only a director can know an actor or a father can know his daughter. When Agnes visits Nora after she hasn’t been returning her calls, the two sisters have one of the most emotionally resonant conversations imaginable. Just as Nora cared for Agnes as a girl, shielding her from her parents’ arguments and guiding her along the way to something brighter, Trier shows us the evolution and the power of their sisterly bond. As adults, that care is reciprocal, with Agnes embracing Nora when she needs her most; Reinsve and Lilleaas effortlessly depicting years of their relationship in just a single glance. It’s the most emotionally affecting, empathetic scene I’ve seen in a movie in years, and one that will have audiences leaving the theater with a new perspective on healing and the power of art as a tool to understand each other. 

Gustav describes his film’s final scene as “a complete sync between time and space.” With its brilliantly executed “film within a film” structure, Sentimental Value is just that for the Borg family, a haunted house movie about the things a family can give to each other. The objects within the home may contain sentimental value, but often, the things that family members pass down aren’t items you can pick and choose, not a vase or a home, but an experience or an emotion. In Nora’s essay, she imagined the house, used to the noise of its inhabitants, hating silence most of all. Trier and his brilliant actors fill that home with noise again, creating a new memory that the Borgs will pass to future generations and an experience that will move audiences perpetually in the way that all great art has for centuries.

Grade: A

This review is from the 2025 Cannes Film Festival where Sentimental Value premiered In Competition. NEON will release the film theatrically in the U.S.