Joachim Trier finds piercing drama in the stories families tell — and the silences they preserve Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is an intelligent, emoti…
Joachim Trier finds piercing drama in the stories families tell — and the silences they preserve
Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is an intelligent, emotionally restrained family drama about estrangement, artistic inheritance and the uneasy border between understanding another person and turning them into material. Reuniting Trier with screenwriter Eskil Vogt and actor Renate Reinsve, the film approaches reconciliation without pretending that recognition can erase harm.
The story begins with a fractured family. Nora, a successful stage actor played by Reinsve, and her younger sister Agnes, played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, are brought back into contact with their absent father after their mother’s death. Gustav Borg, embodied by Stellan Skarsgård, is a once-prominent filmmaker hoping to revive his career with an autobiographical project.
Gustav offers Nora the leading role. Her refusal is more than a professional decision: it rejects his assumption that art can provide a convenient route around years of emotional neglect. He subsequently casts Rachel Kemp, a young American star played by Elle Fanning, bringing an outsider into a story whose wounds she can study but never fully possess.
The family home as an archive
Trier and Vogt build the drama around a compelling question: who has the right to shape a family’s history? Gustav sees experience as material to be organised into a film. Nora understands that the same process can strip private pain of its ownership. Agnes, positioned between them, offers another form of memory — less theatrical, but no less consequential.
The inherited house gives this conflict physical form. It is not merely a setting but an archive of absences, routines and events that different family members remember differently. The building suggests continuity, yet the people inside it have no shared account of what that continuity means. This architectural metaphor is elegant, occasionally almost too elegant, but it provides the film with a strong emotional and visual centre.
Trier’s direction has long been interested in people who can describe their feelings more readily than they can live with them. Here, filmmaking itself becomes part of that problem. Gustav’s intelligence does not excuse his failures as a parent. Nor does his desire to create something truthful guarantee that he is prepared to hear truths he cannot control.
Performances built around distance
Reinsve is well cast as a performer whose command of the stage sits beside a more private instability. The role extends her collaboration with Trier after The Worst Person in the World, but Nora is a sharper, more defended figure. Her profession makes the father’s proposal especially intrusive: he is asking not simply for forgiveness, but for access to her body and talent as instruments of his self-examination.
Skarsgård’s Gustav is conceived with comparable complexity. The film does not reduce him to a domineering patriarch or misunderstood genius. His charm, vanity and creative seriousness can coexist with cowardice. That refusal of easy moral sorting is one of the screenplay’s principal strengths.
Lilleaas gives Agnes an essential structural role as the sibling who has built a more conventional life while carrying her own version of the family history. Fanning’s Rachel is more exposed to the screenplay’s machinery. Her presence clarifies what cannot be reproduced by research or technique, but the character sometimes appears designed primarily to illuminate the Borg family rather than to exist fully beyond it.
Art cannot substitute for accountability
Sentimental Value, which received the Grand Prix at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, belongs to a recognisable tradition of European family cinema: literate, performance-led and alert to the moral ambiguities of artistic work. Yet its most persuasive insight is not about cinema. It is about the temptation to treat expression as reparation.
Making a film about someone is not the same as listening to them. Understanding the origins of a parent’s damage does not cancel the damage passed to their children. Trier nevertheless leaves room for connection, locating hope in small acts of attention rather than in declarations or sudden absolution.
The result is a thoughtful and finely structured drama whose control can occasionally make its emotional arrangements feel overly tidy. Even so, its central conflict retains a difficult honesty. Sentimental Value recognises that families inherit more than houses and memories: they inherit competing versions of responsibility. What matters is whether those stories become another form of possession, or the beginning of a more truthful conversation.
Editorial disclosure: This assessment is based on official production information, festival documentation and publicly available excerpts rather than first-hand access to the complete film. Further production details are available from the film’s official distributor page.
