Sentimental Value: The BRWC Review.

Joachim Trier has long been one of cinema’s most perceptive observers of human fragility, the slipperiness of memory, and the uneasy intersection between yearning and regret. With Sentimental Value, his reunion with frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt, he returns to familiar thematic terrain—complicated love, lost time, the ghosts of choices made and unmade—yet his canvas feels even richer here. This is a film of quiet devastations and sharp stings, of uncomfortable laughter and sudden vulnerability. Beneath its soft comedic charm beats a wounded, searching heart.

Trier builds this new story around a filmmaker, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), in the twilight of his career, who seeks to excavate family trauma for one last great work. That premise sounds ripe for satire—and the film does indulge in gently poking at the ego and self-mythology of artists—but Trier refuses cynicism. He gives us a man wrestling not only with legacy but with guilt, cowardice, and the irrevocable consequences of absence. The film is simultaneously about cinema as an act of preservation and cinema as an act of trespass. What right do we have to turn personal pain into narrative? When does remembrance become narcissism?

Gustav’s estranged daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), embody two distinct responses to abandonment. Nora, a devoted stage actress, is a tightly wound coil of discipline and resentment. Agnes, who chose the comforts of routine and family life, hides her hurt under politeness and an almost compulsive desire to keep things calm. The death of their mother Sissel forces the trio back into reluctant orbit, and the environment Trier builds around them—wintry landscapes, hushed rooms full of emotional history—feels thick with unsaid things. The family home, still co-owned by Gustav, becomes more than a setting; it is a memory-bruise, a sanctuary and a cage.

When Gustav reveals his intention to dramatize the story of his mother’s suicide—spurred by Nazi-inflicted trauma—the film deepens. There’s tenderness in his desire to honor her and arrogance in assuming he is the rightful narrator. His first misstep is offering Nora the role of her grandmother. Her refusal, steeped in years of emotional self-preservation, lights the fuse. In her place, Gustav casts Rachel Kemp, a Hollywood star played by Elle Fanning with delightful precision. Rachel is luminous, eager, culturally curious—and completely unaware of the psychic landmine she’s stepping into.

Fanning’s performance is a marvel of well-intentioned disruption. Her Rachel is earnest, a little naive, and desperate to do right by a family that cannot decide whether to welcome her or hold her at arm’s length. She becomes both muse and mirror, revealing the absurdities in Gustav’s quest and the contradictions in the sisters’ resentment. The film’s funniest moments often involve Rachel trying to navigate Norwegian emotional etiquette, or to interpret Gustav’s cryptic blend of artistic longing and self-pity.

Yet Trier never allows the humor to feel cruel. His comedy always stems from human awkwardness—the ways people try, fail, and embarrass themselves while reaching for connection. The laughs disarm, opening space for the ache. And the ache cuts deep.

Skarsgård gives one of his most quietly devastating performances. Gustav is selfish, charming, afraid, nostalgic, and sometimes heartbreakingly sincere. Skarsgård plays him as someone who knows he has failed but hopes that art might serve as absolution. Watching him fumble intimacy with his daughters is painful, tender, and painfully recognizable. He does not plead for sympathy, yet the vulnerability in his pauses, the tremor in his stillness, evokes it anyway.

Reinsve continues to prove herself one of the most compelling screen talents working today. Nora’s steel-edge self-discipline fractures gradually, and Trier captures her unraveling with warmth rather than judgment. When Nora finally allows herself to feel—not simply to perform feeling—the release is shattering. Lilleaas, meanwhile, gives Agnes a delicate, layered sadness; her performance speaks in small gestures, in the tightening of shoulders, in half-suppressed grief. Watching her reckon with both love and disappointment feels like witnessing someone breathe through pain in real time.

Trier’s direction is characteristically gentle, lyrical, and precise. His camera lingers not just on faces but on pauses, silences, the emotional texture of rooms. Those who loved The Worst Person in the World will find similar intimacy here, though Sentimental Value has a more mature melancholy. It feels like the film of someone reflecting on aging, parents, and the unchangeability of history—personal and national.

The autobiographical filmmaking plot risks meta-self-indulgence, yet Trier sidesteps the trap by interrogating the very impulse he dramatizes. Gustav’s project is at once noble and corrosive. He wants to tell the truth but also to control the narrative. He wants forgiveness, yet refuses to give up authorship. The film asks whether reliving trauma through art is healing or exploitative, and it offers no easy answers. Instead, it holds space for contradiction, for the possibility that love and harm can coexist.

The cinematography, restrained and wintry, leans into natural light and emotional realism. Every frame feels composed yet lived-in. Music is used sparingly and effectively—a quiet piano here, a nostalgic folk song there—never dictating emotion but underlining it with gentle insistence. The production design brilliantly contrasts artistic spaces and domestic ones: rehearsal rooms, archival film screens, childhood bedrooms preserved like mausoleums of memory.

If there is any critique, it is that the film occasionally lingers too long in introspection; some viewers may crave sharper narrative propulsion. But such patience is part of Trier’s language, and those willing to surrender to its rhythm will find it richly rewarding. The ending, poetic rather than conclusively neat, settles like soft snowfall—melancholic, hopeful, unresolved in the way real relationships often remain.

What lingers most is the film’s emotional honesty. Sentimental Value understands that reconciliation is not a single gesture but a series of small, tentative bridges built across years of hurt. It understands the strange duality of family—that we long for closeness even as we resist vulnerability. And it understands that stories, once told, can both free and bind.

Trier has crafted a film that feels bruised and beautiful, wry and aching. It belongs to the realm of memory-cinema: works that do not simply depict life but feel like remembering life. With luminous performances, emotional precision, and an unguarded compassion, Sentimental Value becomes exactly what its title suggests—not sentimental in tone, but emotionally treasured, quietly precious, carried with you long after the credits roll.

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