Sentimental Value (2025)
Directed by: Joachim Trier
Premise: A Norwegian film director (Stellan Skarsgård) tries to reconnect with his adult daughters (Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) after the death of their mother. He wants to make a movie based on their family and considers casting an American actress (Elle Fanning).
What Works: Sentimental Value is primarily the story of a family. The premise sounds like a mawkish tearjerker but the filmmakers adopt an honest and frequently raw approach. Sisters Nora and Agnus have a distant relationship with their filmmaker father Gustav. He’s in a reflective place with his career being feted at film festivals and his ex-wife dying. Gustav intends to use his next film to revisit the family history and facilitate a reconnection with his daughters. The movie becomes a family drama but also a complex examination of how we remember and the way legacies are constructed. Gustav initially offers the lead role to Nora. When she refuses, Gustav turns to an American celebrity. Developing the project with the American actress and producing it with Netflix gradually changes the nature of the planned film in ways that threaten its integrity. Sentimental Value dramatizes the desire and fear of being seen. Those dueling fears are central to the portrait of the family and that tension plays out in the dramatic arts. Nora seeks her father’s approval and she has become a successful actress but Nora refuses a starring role in his film and suffers intense bouts of stage fright. Sentimental Value is impressively unified. It juggles a lot of themes such as family, legacy, and getting old as well as the conflict between commerce and art. All of these ideas are interweaved in a way that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts and gives Sentimental Value an impressive degree of fictional economy. The performances are terrific especially Renate Reinsve as Nora and Stellan Skarsgård as Gustav. They are credible as a family and the tensions and tender moments are pitched just right.
What Doesn’t: When filmmakers tell stories about characters who are in the movie business, the resulting picture can feel insulated, as though the story is entirely conceived and executed inside a cinematic bubble rather than illuminating the lives of everyday people. It’s the same problem when novelists create protagonists who are writers. Sentimental Value suffers from this a bit. Gustav is an accomplished filmmaker and Nora is a successful stage and television actress. There are a few jokes and references that will play to cinephiles but these moments will probably go over every else’s head. The filmmakers use the profession in a way that enhances the themes of the story and comes across intelligently self-aware but it’s also a little easy and self-indulgent.
Bottom Line: Sentimental Value is a smartly produced film. This is an intimate portrait of a family but also a thoughtful examination of the intersection of life and art.
Episode: #1076 (November 30, 2025)