Vague Visages’ Sentimental Value review contains minor spoilers. Joachim Trier’s 2025 movie features Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

The film festival diet of four to five movies a day can often lead to thematic parallels within the lineup — an overarching thesis strategically placed by the programmers. But at the BFI London Film Festival, where the schedule is largely comprised of titles that have had earlier, higher profile premieres, one receives a clearer sense of the biggest thematic preoccupations for filmmakers in any given year, as titles from across the release calendar are finally all consumed at once. A treacly character study of a movie star facing up to his status as an absent father due to spending most of his daughters’ lives on a film set (Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly) feels of a piece with a more tragic tale of art and family like Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet; however, the ideas of both movies are combined and communicated far more efficiently and elegantly in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. If 2025 will be defined as a year when many of the biggest prestige titles were the result of artists using screen ciphers to look inward at the relationship between their personal lives and the work they create, then Trier’s bittersweet dramedy will be seen as the defining film of this self-analytical trend, if only for how the director slyly subverts expectations.

Trier’s much-anticipated follow-up to The Worst Person in the World (2021) reunites him with actress Renate Reinsve as TV star and theatre performer Nora Borg — another character who would likely describe herself with the moniker of the Norwegian filmmaker’s aforementioned production. Trier’s screenplay, co-written as always with filmmaker Eskil Vogt, refrains from diagnosing a specific, overarching reason for the protagonist’s emotional distress, but the death of her mother and reappearance of her estranged filmmaker father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), certainly hasn’t helped her mental state. Upon returning to Oslo for a funeral, Nora and her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), have contrasting responses to their dad returning out of the blue, not least because this emotionally distant man, who fled back to Sweden decades earlier, acts like no time has passed. He’s a charming, easy-going guy who appears to take a genuine interest in the family and seems earnest that he’s prouder of his daughters than any of the films he’s made. It’s all a little too suspicious after an extended period with no contact.

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After 15 years without making a film, Gustav finally wrote a script for Nora to star in, never mind that he didn’t watch her TV show and left the only theatre production of hers he’d attended at the intermission. Somehow, Skarsgård’s character feels certain that his daughter is the only actress who could handle the part. Nora refuses the offer just as Gustav receives Netflix funding, but a chance meeting with American movie star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) sees the project awkwardly translated into English. And so whatever personal appeal the film was intended to have gradually erodes away as it becomes less of a family affair. A lesser film would invoke this plot point as a form of parent-child conflict, but Sentimental Value avoids any dramatically simplistic confrontations. The movie is moving because it’s a portrait of two emotionally inarticulate people who don’t have the words to reconcile a fractured relationship — the ultimate irony considering the matriarch who passed away was a therapist.

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Nora wears her problems boldly on her sleeve in Sentimental Value but lacks the ability to talk through them. She’s introduced having an anxiety attack and refuses to go on stage at the theatre. Later, Nora tells the married man with whom she’s having an affair (Anders Danielsen Lie as Jakob) that she prefers taken men because she doesn’t need to open herself up to them. Her temperament is starkly at odds with Gustav’s, not least because this distant, angry man from her childhood now openly describes himself as sentimental. Skarsgård’s performance is truly exceptional because he never approaches his character as a self-centered artist. His affection doesn’t feel calculated, and his claim that he wants his family to star in his new movie because his happiest memories of them were on set decades earlier sounds genuine. It’s when Gustav plays up the image of an aging enfant terrible — like when he buys his nine-year-old grandson DVDs of Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) and Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible (2002) for his birthday — that his act feels like a facade. Whenever Skarsgård’s character appears to be approaching a moment where he can fully let his guard down and be emotionally honest with those around him, he puts it back into place, and the frosty dynamic between father and daughter continues unabated. Although Gustav’s film is presumably about his mother, who was a prisoner of war during the Nazi occupation, it’s obvious that his screenplay articulates something about his relationship with Nora. He’s a tortured artist but only in that his way with words hasn’t translated to having a frank conversation with his daughter. Gustav needs to rely on his art to do that heavy lifting for him. 

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Skarsgård’s character can feel like a Rorschach test for viewers’ personal experiences, in terms of how much one is willing to absolve Gustav for past actions or take him at his current word. The man is certainly slippery, as he invents tragic stories about the family home to help Rachel get into character, for example. But the character never feels emotionally manipulative or malicious in his intent when it concerns his own family. Trier exposes what lies beneath Gustav’s charms, which his daughters are immune to, and yet he does appear sincerely apologetic every time he puts his foot in his mouth, like during drunken voicemails to Nora. Gustav is a truly fascinating character because he’s never written nor played like a one-note deadbeat dad, and he returns only because he has attained legal rights to the family home. Trier and Vogt may have taken their cues from several well-known comedies about filmmaking, as there are echoes of various Woody Allen pictures throughout Sentimental Value, but the writers’ characters are far more richer.

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As a film about the healing properties of the creative process, Sentimental Value is rare in that the in-movie writing, performances and direction aren’t cathartic for the characters, but rather function as obstacles when they try to unpack their feelings. However, Trier suggests there’s been a breakthrough in this process. Time may heal all wounds but art doesn’t. Sentimental Value feels all the more honest by arriving on our screens at the same time as films that attempt to convince us otherwise.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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