Sentimental Value: Joachim Trier finds redemption in art’s quiet language of love

Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is a film of extraordinary intimacy and restraint, one that captures how families speak to one another through art when ordinary language has failed. It is a story about the words that remain unsaid and how filmmaking itself becomes a form of translation, a way of expressing love, guilt, and regret without ever having to say “I’m sorry.”

The film begins with the death of Sissel, a psychotherapist and mother of two grown daughters. Her passing draws Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) back to their childhood home, a red house perched on a hillside that hums with history. The home itself feels alive, its walls holding generations of memory. Into this fragile reunion arrives their estranged father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), a once-celebrated filmmaker who has since fallen out of relevance. He left the family years ago and, in the decades since, has largely disappeared from his daughters’ lives.

Now, in his seventies, Gustav returns not only to pay his respects but also with an ulterior motive. He has written a new screenplay, an autobiographical film about his mother, a woman whose life was scarred by wartime trauma and who ultimately took her own life in that same house. Convinced this story will be his artistic resurrection, Gustav asks his daughter Nora, an actress, to play the lead. But Nora refuses. Her rejection is not about the film’s subject matter but about the years of neglect that preceded the request. After years of disinterest in her career, she cannot bring herself to participate in his sudden attempt at intimacy, especially when it doubles as his career comeback.

Gustav’s wounded pride leads him to cast an American actress, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who idolises his early work and believes that by collaborating with him she can rediscover her own artistic authenticity. Rachel’s arrival in Norway sets the stage for the film’s central tension: an absent father trying to reinsert himself into his family’s story through the one medium that has always come easier to him than love.

What follows is not a conventional reconciliation drama but a rich, layered exploration of how creation becomes communication. Trier and longtime co-writer Eskil Vogt are fascinated by the way art functions as emotional language, how film, theatre, and performance can stand in for the conversations families cannot have directly. Gustav directs his film as if it might rewrite his personal history. Nora, watching from the edges, comes to a pivotal realisation towards the end of the film as she reads his script that he was attempting to speak to her through his work. Their interactions are stilted and awkward, but through shared acts of making and observing, something gentler begins to take shape. Forgiveness here is not spoken; it is enacted through the exchange of artistic attention.

Renate Reinsve, in her second collaboration with Trier after The Worst Person in the World, delivers a remarkable performance. Nora is a woman both defined and undone by performance, someone who can embody emotion onstage yet struggles to express it in her own life. Reinsve captures that paradox beautifully, her face an open field of vulnerability and frustration. There is humour and volatility in her presence, but also immense compassion. When she looks at her father, you can see years of hurt coexisting with a longing that has never entirely died.

Opposite her, Stellan Skarsgård gives one of the finest performances of his long career. His Gustav is vain, needy, and occasionally cruel, yet he is never a caricature. Skarsgård plays him as a man who believes that creation is atonement, that if he makes something beautiful it might stand in for the apologies he cannot say. Watching him direct Rachel in a role meant for his daughter is excruciating and tender all at once.

Elle Fanning brings a quiet, surprising warmth to Rachel, whose outsider perspective allows her to sense the pain she has stepped into. Meanwhile, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas provides a grounding counterpoint as Agnes, the more practical, forgiving sibling who recognises that her father’s art is both his gift and his flaw. A scene at the end of the film, between the two sisters, particulary moved me. The shared pain, secrets, and love of siblings being eternal.

Cinematographer Kasper Tuxen renders the Borg house with spectral elegance. The house a pivotal character as the camera seems to drift through rooms like memory itself, lingering on mirrors, windowpanes, and the play of Nordic light across walls heavy with history. Each scene feels both naturalistic and heightened, as if we are witnessing ghosts moving among the living. Trier’s editing, marked by soft blackouts and chapter-like divisions, gives the film a literary rhythm, allowing emotions to accumulate gradually rather than erupt.

Throughout, Sentimental Value feels like a dialogue between mediums. Nora’s world of theatre, live and ephemeral, contrasts with Gustav’s world of cinema, fixed and eternal. When the two finally share a creative space, their connection emerges not through spoken reconciliation but through mutual recognition: each understands that art is the only language the other truly speaks.

For me, this film struck an especially personal chord. As an older sibling who has often mediated family conflict, and as someone who has clashed with her father countless times only to reconnect later through shared rituals such as conversations about a football game, I recognised this pattern instantly. Trier captures the truth of that dynamic with uncanny precision. The film understands that love within families often survives not because we talk about it, but because we keep returning to it through what we love together.

By the end, Sentimental Value resists easy resolution. There are no tearful embraces or grand confessions, only the quiet understanding that art itself has done the talking. Gustav and Nora find one another, fleetingly, through film, through the simple act of looking, creating, and allowing themselves to be seen. In their world, and perhaps in ours, forgiveness is not something spoken. It is something shown.

Sentimental Value is a masterpiece of emotional intelligence, a film that articulates the inarticulable. In its depiction of creation as communication, it becomes an act of empathy, a reminder that art is not only about what we express, but about how we listen when words run out. Trier has made a film about filmmaking that is really about love: imperfect, painful, and utterly human.