IFFI 2025 | ‘Sentimental Value’ movie review: Joachim Trier, you menace

At some point, “Joachim Trier Summer” slipped into every cinephile’s collective cultural calendar this year, and I’ve stopped pretending it isn’t real. But here is a petition to scrap “Joachim Trier Summer” and adopt the far more accurate “Summer of Catastrophic, Character-Building Heartbreak” instead, please.

The Norwegian filmmaker is back with his new awards contender, Sentimental Value (originally Affeksjonsverdi), which landed on the Croisette earlier this year, and promptly turned into a festival monster, earning a whopping 19-minute standing ovation at Cannes. Trier walked away with the Grand Prix, marking the first time a Norwegian film has taken that honour. It’s also his follow-up to 2021’s The Worst Person in the World, reuniting him with Renate Reinsve, alongside Stellan Skarsgard, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Elle Fanning.

Sentimental Value spins a layered drama about a once-famed director who returns to the house he grew up in to make a deeply personal film with his estranged daughters. As someone with a few fault lines in my own family history, I admittedly felt a mild flicker of caution. Was this about to be my long-delayed healing arc, or was I going to spend the next few business days crying into a pillow? Stories like this could go either way.

The film begins its first moments with a shimmer through a beautiful wooden house. Light, life and memories punctuate the old Borg family home, sifting through years and years in a matter of minutes. The gabled, green-ringed abode is an Oslo landmark of feeling, heavy with the residue of multiple generations. It becomes the axis around which Sentimental Value revolves. Trier has previously examined the private storms that shape young adulthood, but here he steps into older, more brittle terrain. This is a patient, intricately felt portrait of a family orbiting a history they cannot fully bear to revisit, yet cannot manage to leave behind.

Gustav Borg, played by Skarsgard in a career-best, returns to the house after the death of his ex-wife, and his reputation as a once-lauded film director trails behind him. He left his daughters when they were children. He left his wife to sort through the detritus of their marriage. And now he reappears with a script drawn from his mother’s suicide in that same house. Skarsgard shapes Gustav with a worn-down charm that sporadically shields his arrogance. His sincerity flickers through cracks he rarely acknowledges. Each of his gestures carries the weight of a rehearsed regret he never quite learned to voice.

The luminous and sharply attuned Renate Reinsve plays Nora, the elder daughter. A celebrated stage actor, she is undone by a stage fright episode early in the film that Trier shapes with an almost documentary alertness. Her panic ricochets through backstage corridors, and her body language pitches between fury and collapse. Reinsve anchors her role with an instinctive, almost meta-commentary grasp of how performance can become a battleground. Her own father’s absence sits behind every movement. Even in scenes where she is composed, something in her attention seems permanently split, as if she cannot stop listening for echoes in a room that no longer speaks to her.

Agnes, played by a tremendous Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, is steadier on the surface. The younger daughter is now a mother who has stitched her life into a manageable pattern. The film pokes and prods at the cost of that steadiness. As a child, she worked in one of Gustav’s films in a rare interval of closeness that she remembers with confusion and longing. Lilleaas captures the ache of that memory without sentimentality (pun intended). Her scenes move in quiet counterpoint to Nora’s more emphatic spirals, but feel so much more affecting. Together they form a portrait of sisterhood shaped by absence and the wary tenderness of adults who once clung to each other in the dark.

Trier’s film gives the house a distinct pulse. The walls carry the imprint of arguments overheard through old pipes. Nora’s childhood essay describes it as alive, and the narration regards it as a structure with its own inclinations. It fills itself with presences, recoils from silence, and splinters under the strain of decades. Kasper Tuxen’s cinematography draws out each angle and corridor with a clarity that never feels clinical. The Scandinavian daylight glazes the rooms in soft brightness, making the darker histories slip through almost unnoticed. Trier allows the house to speak for itself, but seldom louder than the people struggling inside it.

When Gustav decides to shoot his new film there, the old tensions resurface with alarming speed. He offers Nora the role of her grandmother. She refuses with a fury sharpened by years of neglect. Instead, he casts Rachel Kemp, an American star played by Elle Fanning. Rachel’s arrival adds a new layer of disorientation. She is mismatched for the part, yet her earnestness and curiosity loosen something in the film’s rhythm. Trier lets her presence reveal the contours of the family’s pain without forcing revelations. Fanning plays Rachel with an intuitive gentleness. She senses when she has stepped into a story that does not belong to her, and her eventual hesitation lands with grace.

Gustav directs like a therapist working with his actors. He turns Rachel’s questions back on her with a habitual “What do you think?” while simultaneously coaxing from her the gestures he once denied his daughters. The language of filmmaking promises revelation, yet each attempt at candour is coaxed, redirected, or trimmed to fit the story Gustav prefers. Trier leans into distilling this recursive fetish for “capturing truth” and that naiive faith in catharsis-by-cinema.

An actor (Fanning) playing an actor (Rachel) trying to inhabit a woman she never knew, rehearsing scenes within scenes, in a role written for another actor (Reinsve) playing another actor (Nora), coached by a man who can’t articulate what he wants because he can’t face what he’s written —  there’s dry humour in the way Trier approaches this boundary-blurring impulse like a gently exasperated meta-observer, chasing a version of emotional accuracy that keeps slipping between intention and projection.

I’d joked earlier about whether this film would heal me or leave me in a wet-eyed heap, and the answer arrived in the most punishing way possible with the sisters’ reconciliation. What finally cracks something open between the two is the unmistakable recognition that Gustav’s script was brushing against Nora’s life rather than the personal tragedy he claimed to be exhuming. It’s an austere moment, thick with that awful domestic stillness of every remembered childhood grievance when Nora finally says the thing she’s carried for years: “How did it happen? You turned out fine and I’m f****d up”, to which Agnes responds, “But we didn’t have the same childhood. I had you.”

Not cool, Joachim. I’m not okay.

Sentimental Value evolves with a remarkable emotional clarity that deepens scene by scene. Trier has crafted one of his richest, most humane works. The performances are superb. The images settle into memory with startling ease. And the film’s closing cadence affirms its place among the most moving (read: crushing) cinematic experiences of the year.

Sentimental Value was screened at the ongoing 56th International Film Festival of India in Goa 

Published – November 23, 2025 06:52 pm IST