Joachim Trier’s latest film Sentimental Value is about how the empty shell of a house becomes a home, how a family split apart can find ways of coming together, and how the reshaping of narratives can help heal emotional trauma. After a string of films that increasingly gained attention on the festival circuit, with his previous film garnering an Oscar nomination for Best International Film, his latest checks off so many boxes for lovers of this quiet form of auteur cinema that it’s likely to be a smash hit.
Sentimental Value (or Affeksjonsverdi in its original Norwegian, the compound words literally translate to “the value of affection,” though “sverd,” the word for “sword,” is buried in there as well) is the story of two sisters, anchored by an emotionally wrought yet effective turn by Renate Reinsve. Mining similar modes of melancholia she expressed in her breakout film, 2021’s The Worst Person In the World, she once again firmly establishes herself as one of the great actors of her generation, and one of Trier’s great discoveries. There’s a fine line in playing such a broken character, ensuring that the manic swings feel real, the anxiety palpable, but not so over-the-top that it becomes unbearable.
Reinsve plays Nora, and we meet her backstage wrapped in a flowing black dress, the corset heaving her chest and her anxiety preventing her from breathing. Literally ripping at the confines of her clothing, she delays the start of the show in order to take a breath, grab a kiss, and try to convince her married lover/fellow cast member for a quick shag before going out in front of an audience. Black duct tape is used to quickly mend the broken seams, the ersatz repair indicative of how precariously both the costume and the character are holding themselves together.
The scene is a mix of electric excitement, emotional rawness, and dark comedy, and it’s the deft mix of all these elements that makes Trier’s film sing. Voiceover narration details the house where Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) grew up. The anthropomorphized descriptions of the edifice seeking the comfort of company, of mourning the silences as voices come and go as it forlornly looks to an outside world it can only observe, would in other contexts be heavy handed. Yet thanks to Trier’s visual flourishes, and the carefully constructed script co-written with frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt, the many metaphors of the handsome edifice connect brilliantly to the emotional turmoil of its occasional inhabitants.
One of those who helped make the house both more aggressively loud and then silent with his absence is their father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), an internationally celebrated Nordic filmmaker who is feted on the festival circuit, but who hasn’t been able to make a movie for a decade and a half. He’s crafted a script that he tells his oldest daughter was written for her, and despite his pleas she refuses to even read the part.
After a chance encounter on the beaches of Deuville he meets American startlet Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), whose energy and vitality immediately excites. Deciding to cast her in his production in lieu of Nora, he soon tries to assemble some of his former collaborators, only to find that time has indeed moved on for many of them.
The conceit of a film-within-a-film is hardly new, but that does little to diminish its effectiveness here. It’s unclear just how many times filmmakers have made their movies to exorcize their own familial trauma, but despite over and over saying that the film’s not about his mother, it is about those closest to him, the fictionalization not so subtly disguising the connection to those closest to him.
The role of Rachel may be the most thankless of all. While Skarsgård gets to employ his trademark growl, shifting between soothing words of encouragement for his actor to more broad words of confrontation to his daughter, Reinsve gets to live in the center of this world, and even Ibsdotter Lilleaas is provided a role as the youngest daughter that’s fully dimensional. Fanning meanwhile must at once perform in the film as a fine actress who’s not quite right for the role. There’s a tension here, as she’s got to be great, but not great enough–we need to see why the father’s well-telegraphed reversal is inevitable, but not in a way that feels false or overly prescribed.
Fanning does well to skate this line, and certain tics (including her attempts at a Scandy accent) are exactly what one would expect from such a performer within the narrative. The culmination of the collaboration with Gustav may be a bit too free from drama, and discussion about whether the role should revert to Norwegian instead of the English translation may be a bit too on the nose metatextually, but somehow it all seems to work without too much fuss.
Reconciliation through shared artistry may feel slightly hackneyed, yet the mood and milieu have been so assiduously drawn by Trier and his collaborators that any concerns about being mired in the clichés soon abate. The film is as unabashedly sentimental as its title implies, with tear-filled scenes, plenty of hugs, and even more of moments of downright existential angst. Yet there are also moments of lightness sprinkled throughout, and despite the theatricalized dramatic elements and somewhat purple language of the voiceover, there’s both a deep intimacy and exceptional believability, as well as a dash of full-on humor, that makes things far less dour than they otherwise easily could have been.
Building upon his previous film’s success, Trier’s latest is sure to gain even more fans for both his aesthetic and the talents of his principal collaborator. The film lives or dies on the performance of Reinsve, and she once again shows, as she also did in the recent Armand, that she’s up to the task of shouldering such a complex character with seeming ease.
With top notch performances, richly drawn visuals that are lovely but never over-the-top, and a compelling story, Sentimental Value is the stuff of arthouse dreams for many, exactly the kind of adult story to feed cinephiles the world over starving for substance in a sea of IP titles, half-baked remakes, and dour, minimalist offerings. Add in some killer needle drops (Terry Callier,Pastor T.L. Barrett,Johnny Thunder,Judy Tzuke,Yusuf Lateef) and you have the makings of an instant classic. For those that want a good story, and a good cry, a film unabashedly sentimental without descending into maudlin parody, they’re in for a treat, sure to be swept away by the story of Nora, her family, and the house she once called a home.
Director: Joachim Trier Writers: Eskil Vogt, Joachim Trier Stars: Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning, Cory Michael Smith Release date: May 21, 2025 (Cannes)
Jason Gorber is a Toronto based film Critic and Journalist, Editor-in-Chief at That Shelf, the movie critic for CBC’s Metro Morning, and others. He is a member of the Toronto Film Critics Association and voter for the Critics Choice Awards Association. He also knows for a fact that CASINO is Scorsese’s masterpiece, and has a cat named Zissou.
