Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value thinks art can heal a broken family. It does not notice that making the film does to the family what the father did.
| Director | Joachim Trier |
|---|---|
| Year | 2025 |
| Runtime | 133 minutes |
| Cast | Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Reinsve, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning |
| Award | Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival 2025 |
| Streaming | MUBI, Fandango at Home |
Gustav Borg can only parent through a camera lens. This is the central, quietly devastating observation at the heart of Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s Grand Prix winner from Cannes 2025, and the film knows it. Gustav, played by Stellan Skarsgård with the particular charm of a man who has spent a lifetime being forgiven for things that perhaps deserved less forgiveness, is a once-celebrated Norwegian filmmaker returning to his estranged daughters after their mother’s death. He has written a new script, his potential comeback, based on their grandmother’s wartime suffering and eventual suicide. He wants Nora, the elder daughter played by Renate Reinsve, to play the lead. When she refuses, he replaces her with an eager young Hollywood actress named Rachel Kemp, played by Elle Fanning, and proceeds to treat Rachel with a paternal warmth that his own daughters never quite received.
The film watches all of this with clear eyes. It understands Gustav precisely. It knows he is a man who relates to people most fluently when he can put them on the other side of a camera, that proximity without a frame between them makes him evasive and slightly helpless. Trier is not naive about his protagonist. Sentimental Value is, in almost every visible way, a film that has thought carefully about what it is doing.
Almost every way.
Here is what the film does not see. Gustav takes his family’s most private wounds, his mother’s torture, her suicide, his daughters’ grief, and turns them into material for a film. The daughters, particularly Nora, experience this as a violation. And the film agrees with them. It shows us clearly that Gustav’s artistic ambition is inseparable from his emotional avoidance, that the camera is always, for him, a way of relating without quite arriving.
“Trier has taken his characters’ most private wounds and turned them into material for a film. Which is precisely what he is accusing Gustav of doing. The film is the thing it is examining, and it cannot see itself in the mirror it holds up.”
But then consider what Joachim Trier has done. He has taken a story about family damage, estrangement, a daughter’s suicide attempt that her father never knew about, grief that has been passed down through generations like a physical inheritance, and he has turned it into a film. A beautiful, carefully crafted, emotionally precise film that audiences and critics have embraced with enormous warmth. He has done with his characters’ pain exactly what Gustav does with his family’s pain. The camera sits between Trier and his subjects in the same way it sits between Gustav and his daughters. The film accuses its protagonist of using art as a buffer against real feeling while being itself a supreme example of the same instinct. It does not notice. It cannot. You cannot see the frame you are standing inside.
This is not a criticism of Trier’s filmmaking. It is an observation about where the film’s self-awareness stops. And it stops, with notable precision, just before it would have to turn the camera on itself.
The second thing Sentimental Value does not know it is doing is written into its title.
The film is at enormous pains not to be sentimental. This is Scandinavian filmmaking: restrained, precise, alive to irony, suspicious of easy warmth. Trier and his co-writer Eskil Vogt build their emotional moments with the care of people who know exactly how quickly sincerity can curdle into manipulation. The film earns its feeling. You cannot fault the craft.
And then the ending arrives. Gustav sells the family home to fund his film independently, freeing himself from Netflix and its compromises. Nora, having read her father’s script and discovered that he somehow knew about her suicide attempt, finally agrees to take the role. The family is, in its fractured way, partly repaired. The final shot shows the home stripped and renovated, modern and emptied of its history, the ghosts cleared out. It is bittersweet and lovely and it gives everyone, including Gustav, a redemption that two hours of careful, honest filmmaking suggests he has not entirely earned.
The film called Sentimental Value is afraid of sentimentality for two hours and then surrenders to it completely. It names its own greatest weakness in its title and then walks directly into it. Trier has made a film about the danger of tying your feelings to objects and places and people who cannot carry the weight, and then he has made sure everyone puts their weight down safely at the end. That is not a flaw exactly. But it is a choice the film does not appear to know it is making.
The comparison that cuts deepest here is Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978). Also an estranged parent and child. Also a celebrated artist whose devotion to their work consumed everything that should have gone to their family. Also a film about the confrontation between what a parent believes they gave and what a child knows they received. But Bergman does not let anyone leave the room feeling better. The central confrontation between Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann in Autumn Sonata is one of the most unsparing things in cinema, a scene in which the film refuses, absolutely and without mercy, to offer either character a way out. Next to that film, Sentimental Value‘s final generosity toward Gustav feels like a closed door opened just enough to let the light in without requiring anyone to actually step through it.
The second comparison sits closer to home. Trier’s own The Worst Person in the World (2021) followed Julie, a young woman drifting through choices and relationships without quite being able to commit to any of them, and it loved her without softening her. It let her be frustrating and alive and genuinely unresolved at the end. Sentimental Value is a more mature film in almost every technical sense. But it is also a less courageous one. Gustav gets the grace that Julie never quite received. Whether he deserves it is the question the film quietly decides not to ask.
Sentimental Value is a very good film pretending not to notice that it is also a slightly too comfortable one. Trier is one of the finest working directors, and the performances here, particularly Reinsve, who can communicate an entire history of damage in a single held breath, are extraordinary. But the film that accuses its father of using a camera to avoid feeling has itself used a camera, exquisitely, to control exactly how much feeling reaches us. That control is what keeps it from greatness. And the film, characteristically, cannot see this. It is too busy being precise about everyone else.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Autumn Sonata (Ingmar Bergman, 1978): the same confrontation between artistic parent and damaged child, with none of the exits left open.
The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier, 2021): Trier at his most unsentimental, which turns out to be Trier at his most honest, and his most moving.
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