November 21, 2025 · Watch the official trailer
Decades of generational trauma bubble quietly beneath the surface of Joachim Trier’s achingly bittersweet “Sentimental Value,” a family drama bathed in cluttered interiors, faded trinkets, and a somber emotional register that never quite allows its characters to come up for air.
Winner of major prizes at Cannes earlier this year, the film arrives stateside carrying the serious awards potential – and the quiet confidence of a filmmaker fully in control of melancholy.
The story follows two sisters, Nora and Agnes, who are still reeling from the recent death of their mother when their long-absent father, Gustav – a celebrated but emotionally distant film director – abruptly reenters their lives. His request that Nora star in his new project becomes the fracture through which years of resentment, longing, and unspoken grief begin to surface.
And yet, for a film titled “Sentimental Value,” Trier’s drama is almost defiantly unsentimental. There’s an emptiness where vulnerability should be, a hollow that lingers between Nora and Gustav, and audiences often feel tossed in the emotional undertow as the film moves from one quietly charged moment to the next.
Renate Reinsve plays Nora as a woman whose incompleteness comes from a deep emotional loss, and from the overwhelming sense that she’s unable to provide herself the kind of life she wants. In a deeply affecting way, Reinsve is able to draw audiences in with eyes that are not sunken yet reflect years of endless sobbing and are constantly on the verge of welling up.
This layers Nora’s character greatly and propels their sisterly bond as Agnes becomes an anchor and source of strength for Nora, yet a constant reminder of Nora’s perceived failures. As Nora, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas does a terrific job of not just playing a stagnant, stoic, one-note character, but someone whose own traumas are far more internalized and further along the path of healing.
Conversely, it almost feels at times as if Stellan Skarsgård is in a separate movie all to himself as Gustav, with Trier thrusting the character into the lives of his daughters for emotional impact while simultaneously examining his own trauma as a secondary subplot. Skarsgård does a terrific job of balancing subtle inner anguish with the bravado of a tortured artist, unwilling – or perhaps unable – to recognize his own flaws and how his absence affected his daughters.
Elle Fanning brings a change-of-pace energy to the film as a famous American actress Gustav chooses to lead his film. And while her performance doesn’t get in the way of the emotional tones Trier aims for, her embodiment of Rachel does have enough stark differences to suggest that Rachel is almost another sister, and indicative of the high-society film world he chose over his family.
Trier employs a subtle structural device – brief flashes of black between scenes – that forces viewers to sit deliberately in the film’s melancholy, letting it seep in rather than wash over. The cinematography is rich but never indulgent, capturing the textures of artistic spaces without calling undue attention to itself.
And the film’s mesmerizing final sequence, a beautiful layering of reality and fiction, blurs the line between Trier’s authorship and Gustav’s, a meta touch that deepens the film’s emotional resonance rather than distracting from it.
Trier does an exceptional job not simply of telegraphing a sense of place through his camera work –which maps the geography of the home with intuitive precision –but of making a clear narrative decision to extend the family house into a character in its own right.
It’s an idea reminiscent of what Robert Zemeckis explored last year in the Tom Hanks–led “Here,” which similarly posited that places can hold memories and imprint themselves on the people who pass through them. But Trier’s far more subtle approach frames that argument with greater emotional nuance, allowing the house’s creaking silences, cluttered corners, and inherited objects to deepen the film’s thematic texture rather than dominate it.
While “Sentimental Value” will be Norway’s submission for Best International Film at the 2026 Academy Awards, a notable portion of the film is in English – particularly the tense, revealing exchanges between Gustav and Rachel – which may ease the viewing experience for American audiences less practiced with subtitles.
Should its momentum hold, the film could be a formidable presence across the Academy’s top categories including Best International Feature, Best Picture, Best Director and Original Screenplay for Trier, Best Actress for Reinsve, Supporting Actor for Skarsgård, and a range of below-the-line craft considerations.
Although “Sentimental Value” may not be widely accessible to cinephiles until perhaps as late as early next year, this arrestingly melancholy family drama is well worth seeking out for art-film lovers simply wanting to find the best films of 2025.
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