The Norwegian director Joachim Trier actually completed his “Oslo trilogy” after “at the beginning”, “Oslo, August 31” and “The worst person in the world”. With the tragicomedy “Sentimental value“However, he now expands it to a tetralogy in a way, although this time the city, but above all a single house, plays an important role: here a long absent director, played by the Swedish screen legend Stellan Skarsgård (“ Thor ”), wants to make a film.
For the leading role, he wants his own daughter, but stupidly contemptuous, embodied by Renate Reinsve, who rose to an international cinema star with “The worst person in the world” a few years ago. For this duo, Trier has built a loose structured tragic comedy that illuminates the therapeutic possibilities of art, even with snippies, even with snippets in the direction of (Hollywood) film operations, but above all convinced when he focuses entirely on the touching-complex dynamics between daughter and father.
In contrast to her father, her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) was always there for Nora (Renate Reinsve).
Shortly before the premiere of a new play at the theater in Oslo, the main actress Nora (Renate Reinsve) suffers a nervous breakdown behind the stage – only a decent baking pipe from her lover with another married lover can get her back on track. Despite the lamp fever, the early 30-year-old is professionally successful-but while her younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) already has a man and son, Nora considers her own private life to be a disaster. She also sees one reason for this in her father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), who left her mother and almost never visited the family house afterwards.
But now Gustav reappears, of all people at the funeral service for the mother that has just died. It doesn't look like it at all, and it actually happens with a ulterior motive: Gustav was once a successful film director, but his career has stumbled. Now he has written a new script and absolutely wants to hire Nora for the leading role (probably also because her awareness would help financing). But Nora rejects without reading the script. However, Gustav succeeds in a happy coincidence, instead the Hollywood megastar Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) for the part, who is apparently borrowed from his own mother, to win …
A house as the main actor
The first character that is presented in “Sentimental Value” is a house. In a long introduction, an officer report reports in the gesture of a fairytale aunt of the many stories that have taken place on the planks of the two-story wooden house in the past 100 years. Hard to present what these walls have heard over the decades: festivals and dinner, births, but also deaths, joy and suffering. In this house on the edge of Oslos, the family has been living for eternal times – and here Gustav's mother once committed suicide when he was still a little boy. Obviously, the processing of these events is also one of the drives for the new film.
A little reminds the living room-in-and-running-the-year-mastery “here” underestimated by Robert Zemeckis', but technically far from it, but rather in a European art house manner, which is always reminiscent of films by Ingmar Bergman or plays by Henrik Ibsen. His “Nora” also was also the inspiration for Reinsve's figure, a neurotic actress who lives in a doll's home who deals more with herself and her problems than with other people. Less narratively ambitious than earlier films by Joachim Trier, “Sentimental Value” has a concentrated effect on the central daughter-father conflict, which reduces all other characters in the film for staffage. Ellen Fanning (“The Great”) in particular acts a bit underwhelmed as a Hollywood Starett with art ambitions before she can at least say goodbye to a wonderful scene. And also Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as Nora's sister Agnes remains more passive, since she is the younger, but also more emotionally more stable of the two.
From Bergman to Ibsen
Like Bergman, Trier uses the stage and film as a mirror of the reality of his characters, staged scenes in which Nora can be seen as Medea, for example. Once we see a longer sequence from an earlier film by Gustav, in which a young girl escapes from soldiers during the Second World War and saves herself on a departing train while her brother stays behind and snapped. At the end of the scene, the camera stays on the face of the crying child for minutes, which – as you learn later – was played by Agnes. Nevertheless, it was the other sister who became the actress and thus described herself an expressive art, while in private, she is hardly able to verbalize her deeply sitting aversion to the father.
The strongest scenes of the sometimes meandering film are those between Nora and Gustav, between the young star Renate Reinsve and the old rabbit Stellan Skarsgård, who plays one of the best roles of his career here. Gustav is an artist type, convinced of himself and with clear announcements, but not in an unpleasant, arrogant way-especially his Netflix side cuts is hilarious and with the DVDs of “irreversible” and “The piano player” he also knows exactly what you should give a nine-year-old's birthday. However, there is no dramatic clarifying conversations here, no cathartic moment leads to solving the conflicts. Instead, many questions are only torn down, the circumstances of the death of mother and grandmother are not clarified in detail. Joachim Trier does not really add really new facets to his work, but as a variation of his preoccupation with complicated families and emotions, “Sentimental Value” works pretty well.
Conclusion: With the tragicomic “sentimental value” Joachim Trier complements his Oslo trilogy with another chapter, varies well-known subjects and this time more than before refers to Nordic classics from Bergman to Ibsen. Above all, the two stars Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård convince as a daughter-father team, which succeeds in overcoming his longstanding alienation with the help of art (possibly).
We saw “Sentimental Value” at the Cannes Film Festival 2025, where he celebrated its world premiere as part of the official competition.