Sentimental Value

There is a specific, prickly sensation that comes with watching a Joachim Trier film—a feeling of being seen in a way that’s both flattering and deeply uncomfortable. It’s like catching your reflection in a shop window and realizing your posture is terrible, but your coat looks fantastic. In Sentimental Value, that feeling is amplified by the presence of Renate Reinsve, who has essentially become the face of modern existential yearning. I watched this in a theater where the person behind me was unwrapping a lozenge so slowly it felt like a three-act play, and strangely, that agonizing tension perfectly mirrored the domestic cold war unfolding on screen.

The Architect of Melancholy Returns

If you’ve followed the "Oslo Trilogy"—Reprise, Oslo, August 31st, and The Worst Person in the World—you know that Joachim Trier and his writing partner Eskil Vogt specialize in a very particular brand of intellectual heartbreak. They write about people who have read all the right books but still can't figure out how to be happy. Sentimental Value feels like a spiritual graduation from those earlier works. We’ve moved past the "what do I do with my life?" anxiety of the thirties and into the "what did I do with my life?" wreckage of the fifties and sixties.

The setup is deliciously meta. Stellan Skarsgård plays Gustav Borg, a once-lionized film director whose ego has outlasted his relevance. He’s the kind of man who views his children as supporting characters in his own biopic. When he approaches his daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve), a disciplined stage actress, with a role in his "comeback" film, it’s not an olive branch—it’s a demand for validation. Stellan Skarsgård plays a man who would trade his firstborn for a standing ovation at Cannes, and he does it with a charismatic, rumbling menace that makes you understand why his daughters haven't completely cut him off yet.

The Hollywood Interloper

The film takes a sharp, cynical turn when Nora rejects the role. In a move that feels like a stinging critique of our current "star-power-over-everything" industry, Gustav immediately replaces her with Rachel Kemp, a bubbly, eager Hollywood starlet played by Elle Fanning.

This is where the movie gets cerebral. It’s no longer just a family drama; it’s a confrontation between two different types of "value." You have the sentimental, deeply rooted artistic integrity of Nora’s stage work versus the shiny, disposable, and highly profitable "value" of a global star like Rachel. Elle Fanning is brilliant here, playing Rachel not as a villain, but as a genuine person who is accidentally colonizing someone else’s trauma for a performance. The scenes where Nora has to watch this "version" of herself—directed by the father who abandoned her—are some of the most quietly devastating sequences I’ve seen in years. It’s a masterful look at how the streaming era’s demand for "recognizable IP" and "global faces" can strip the soul out of personal storytelling.

A Score for the Soul

I have to talk about the technical craft, because Trier’s team is operating at a peak here. The cinematography by Kasper Tuxen (who also shot The Worst Person in the World) treats Oslo and France with a crisp, autumnal clarity. But the real MVP is Hania Rani. Her score is a minimalist wonder, all repeating piano motifs that feel like thoughts you can't get out of your head. It’s the kind of music that makes a simple walk down a street feel like a life-altering event.

The ensemble is rounded out by Trier regulars, including the indispensable Anders Danielsen Lie, who could probably generate more pathos by drinking a glass of water than most actors do in a monologue. Even Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, as the "stable" sister Agnes, provides a necessary grounding force, reminding us that while Nora and Gustav are fighting over art, life is actually happening elsewhere—in mortgages, in children, in the mundane stuff that Gustav’s ego won't allow him to see.

Cool Details

The Reinsve Reunion: This marks the third collaboration between Renate Reinsve and Joachim Trier. They’ve developed a shorthand where a three-second close-up of her eyes does the work of five pages of dialogue. The Budget Leap: With a $7.8 million budget, this is one of Trier’s most "expensive" ventures, and you can see it in the shifting locations and the polish of the film-within-a-film segments. The Vogt Connection: Eskil Vogt, Trier's co-writer, actually directed the terrifying The Innocents (2021). You can feel his darker, more clinical edge balancing out Trier’s more romantic sensibilities. Box Office Win: Despite being a dense Norwegian drama, it pulled in $22 million globally—a testament to the "Trier brand" built by the viral success of his previous film during the pandemic streaming boom.

Sentimental Value is a film that asks if we can ever truly separate the art from the artist, especially when the artist is our own father. It’s a movie that trusts its audience to sit with ambiguity and uncomfortable silence. While it might lack the kinetic, "lightning-in-a-bottle" energy of The Worst Person in the World, it replaces it with a profound, aching maturity. It’s a gorgeous, intellectual gut-punch that reminds me why we still need the theatrical experience—even if someone is loudly unwrapping a lozenge in the row behind you.