Some movies wow you with their technical prowess. Others sneak up on you and remake you: subdued works of art that know there’s something that can’t be said but won’t let you forget it either. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is one of the latter. An exquisitely felt and fluidly beautiful family drama, the film explores the reverberations of emotional trauma across generations, how psychic pain is inherited and reformatted, beautified, and—occasionally—weaponized. The result is a moving, powerful film that doubles down on both sentiment and beauty.
Reviewed by Allan R. Ellenberger
Working at the intersections of the personal and performative has been Trier's stock-in-trade, and his latest effort returns the lens to itself. It's possibly his most intimate film. When their mother dies, sisters Nora and Agnes find themselves reluctantly re-connected to their father Gustav. Returning to their childhood home, the family unpacks years of buried emotions, grievances and bartered bargains.
Nora, played with raw precision by Renate Reinsve, is a confident theatre actress who’s carefully honed her emotional armor through her craft, but her brash exterior belies her brokenness. As Nora, Reinsve gives a remarkable performance of suppressed vulnerability; we never see her acting painful emotions but feel them through silences and deflections and things left unsaid. Her sister Agnes, portrayed by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, on the other hand, comes off as stable and emotionally functional—but Trier doesn’t equate stability with safety here. Both sisters suffer from the same legacy, manifested in different coping mechanisms.
At the center of the storm is Gustav, played by Stellan Skarsgård in one of his most perfectly tuned performances ever. Gustav is a celebrated director whose charm and artistic credibility have long covered for his narcissism. Skarsgård never lets us turn Gustav into a cartoon villain. He doesn't roar. He murmurs. He's the minimalist villain - his narcissism evidenced less by cruelty than by simply not caring. Gustav wants everyone to love him again, but on his schedule, and without him having to fully confront the wreckage he's caused.
Complications arise when Gustav asks Nora to participate in his upcoming film—a project she declines, promptly usurped by Gustav's leading lady: Rachel, a luminous Elle Fanning, an accomplished American actress. But what happens when this outsider inserts herself into a story that this family is still attempting to parse out? Fanning gives one of the most restrained performances you'll see this year—and for that reason it is all the more affecting. She floats through the movie with this eerie neutrality: equal parts appropriation and sympathy. She's reflective of the family's grief, but also hyper-aware of how her presence pushes the boundaries of taste. When does storytelling cross the line into violation?
What makes Sentimental Value resonate on such an emotional level is that it doesn't allow for convenient villains or catharsis. Trier knows that familial trauma is never presented as cleanly. It hides in tone and gesture and silence. In things left unsaid because they've been said too many times already. It's in the film's specificity: resentment living alongside love, forgiveness neither redemptive nor promised.
Viscerally, Trier’s direction doesn’t pull any punches either. Proceeding almost entirely in vignettes broken up by sudden blackouts - cuts that feel violent at first, until you understand they’re as necessary to the grammar of emotion here as anything else: repression, freezing up, losing your train of thought. There’s a sense of buttery-smooth surreptitiousness to the cinematography as well, creeping through rooms with studied intimacy, rendering all the more naked these violations of feeling. As many have noted, the "fluid cinematography" and "perfect editing" allow the film to play out with a rhythm reminiscent of memory: selective, nonlinear, unreliable.
While the sudden cuts to black divide audiences, they're an essential part of Trier's storytelling vision. Serving as a gray area between realism and theatricality, they remind us that families are, in many ways, performances ― fictional tales crafted over time and edited by whoever wields the pen. Life isn't one seamless scene: it's a series of emotional ellipses.
The performances throughout are exquisite. Reinsve grounds the movie with a stunningly raw portrayal of fatigue both emotional and vigilant. Skarsgård is magnetic as Gustav without being likable, pitiable without being sympathetic. Lilleaas provides a reserved strength to Agnes, and Fanning injects an innocence from outside that blurs some of those moral lines. I'm glad to say the Academy recognized all four leads with nominations because it's quite representative of how delicately tuned this cast really is.
Sentimental Value premiered at Cannes where it was awarded the Grand Prix. It was soon recognized as one of the year's most serious films. The awards continued to roll in. Recognition is wide-ranging because viewers have embraced its disciplined form and daring emotion.
Honors almost seem beside the point. Sentimental Value accomplishes something far less common than acclaim. It holds onto that nagging feeling that you never finished telling your family about yourself. It maps out an intimacy found in mutual wreckage. It expresses how art can stitch us together and rip us apart. Trier provides no solutions, only room to sit with the unease, the uncertainty, and the knowledge that love and violence can feel synonymous long after the fact.
In the end, Sentimental Value is not simply about a father and his daughters. It ends up being about the narratives we’re handed down and forced to perform versions of ourselves within. It’s about houses that hold memories long after their residents would prefer them to and about the uncomfortable fact that packaging heartbreak as art doesn’t make it go away—it just dresses it up. Trier gets this, and he trusts us enough to allow us to sit with it.
It's a film of quiet devastation and uncommon grace, one that confirms director Joachim Trier as one of the emotionally smartest filmmakers working today ― and one that earns its place not just in awards conversations, but in the private memory of anyone who has ever tried to outgrow the past without quite escaping it.
If you connected with my review of Sentimental Value (2025), please leave a comment, rate the post, and share it with fellow film lovers to keep the conversation going.
Add comment
Comments