With Sentimental Value, Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier delivers one of his most emotionally assured works to date: a quietly devastating family drama that treats architecture, memory, and artistic creation as interdependent forces. Premiering in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival, the film confirms Trier’s reputation as a filmmaker uniquely attuned to the intimate fractures that define modern emotional life.
At its core, Sentimental Value is about inheritance—not of wealth or status, but of unresolved pain. Sisters Nora and Agnes grow up in an old Oslo house that has absorbed generations of love, absence, and grief. Their father, Gustav Borg, a once-celebrated filmmaker who abandoned the family years earlier, returns after the death of their mother with a proposal that reopens old wounds: he wants to make a new film, shot inside the family home, and written for Nora.
Nora, portrayed with raw volatility by Renate Reinsve, is an acclaimed stage actress whose success masks crippling anxiety. Trier introduces her in a bravura backstage sequence that captures the terror of performance with both dark humor and painful precision. Reinsve gives Nora a nervous physicality—restless, impulsive, self-lacerating—that makes her one of Trier’s most psychologically exposed protagonists to date. Acting is her refuge, but also her battlefield.
Opposite her stands Stellan Skarsgård as Gustav, a man whose artistic sensitivity has always coexisted with emotional negligence. Skarsgård resists easy condemnation, playing Gustav as charismatic, evasive, and quietly terrified of irrelevance. His desire to make the film is framed less as a comeback than as a last attempt to impose meaning on a life defined by abandonment—both inflicted and endured.
When Nora refuses to participate, Gustav casts American movie star Rachel Kemp, played with disarming sincerity by Elle Fanning. Rachel’s arrival introduces a subtle but incisive commentary on contemporary cinema: globalized stardom, streaming platforms, and the uneasy ethics of telling stories rooted in other people’s trauma. Rather than positioning Rachel as a shallow interloper, Trier allows her a genuine emotional curiosity, making her discomfort with the project one of the film’s quiet moral pivots.
The emotional counterweight to this volatile triangle is Agnes, the younger sister, portrayed with grounded warmth by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. Where Nora spirals, Agnes stabilizes. Their relationship—marked by reversed roles of protector and dependent—becomes the film’s most humane axis. Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt write their exchanges with a naturalism that resists melodrama, allowing affection and resentment to coexist without forced resolution.
Visually, Sentimental Value is restrained yet luminous. Cinematographer Kasper Tuxen captures the Scandinavian light as something almost ethical—clear, revealing, impossible to hide within. The house itself functions as a silent witness, its cracked foundation a metaphor that Trier wisely never overexplains. Music by Hania Rani and carefully curated soul and folk tracks deepen the film’s sense of temporal layering, binding past and present into a shared emotional register.
What distinguishes Sentimental Value from more conventional family dramas is its refusal to offer catharsis on demand. There are no grand reconciliations, no therapeutic conclusions. Instead, Trier suggests that art can open dialogue without resolving it—that creation may be less about healing wounds than about finally acknowledging their shape.
Measured, compassionate, and quietly profound, Sentimental Value stands as Joachim Trier’s most mature meditation on family, authorship, and memory. It is a film that understands homes not as safe havens, but as emotional archives—structures that remember everything, whether we want them to or not.
By Michel Riet – Cannes 2025
