“It’s hard to love someone without mercy.”
Sitting across the dinner table from his actress daughter after sweeping back into her life with a high-concept plan for reconciliation, acclaimed filmmaker and absent father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) offers that wisdom to Nora (Renate Reinsve) as if directing her on how to forgive him. And in the wake of his ex-wife’s death, that’s precisely what Gustav intends to do — not by apologizing for his decision to leave their family when Nora was still just a child, but rather by casting her in an autobiographical Netflix drama about his own life.
Exploitative as that sounds, Gustav isn’t just hoping to make Nora say the words he’s always longed to hear from his firstborn daughter in exchange for a cut of Ted Sarandos’ money. On the contrary, his plan — like everything else in the transcendently moving “Sentimental Value,” a layered masterpiece that “The Worst Person in the World” director Joachim Trier has been working toward for his entire career — is layered with a delicate sense of personal history. Because the (once) great auteur Borg doesn’t intend for Nora to play a version of herself in his movie. No, he insists on using her as a stand-in for his mother, who committed suicide in the sun-bathed Oslo house that has belonged to their family since at least the start of World War II.
Gustav has never understood the reasons why his mother took her own life after kissing him goodbye one morning — he was only a child at the time. Now a 70-year-old Volker Schlöndorff-type who’s been fading toward irrelevance in the 15 years since his last narrative feature (and has only found late-career success by entombing himself in a documentary about his life’s work), Gustav is convinced that the answers he seeks are still hiding somewhere in the Borg’s ancestral home. That home contains several generations of secret feelings that will only reveal themselves to those who know how to find the cracks in its foundation.
Nora — whose emotional avoidance has fueled the same acting career that it threatens to derail with stage fright, as we see in a funny and spectacularly fraught scene where she demands that her married lover (Trier mainstay Anders Danielsen Lie) either fuck or slap her before she greets the opening night audience of her latest play — has zero interest in helping Gustav look for where those cracks might be. She also vehemently rejects her father’s offer to star in his film. But as he charges forward with the project anyway (which he intends to shoot in the actual house that inspired its story, and still legally belongs to him), each of the surviving Borgs will be forced to navigate the resentful ocean of lost time that stretches between the truth of who their parents actually were, and the fiction of the characters they’ve created for them to play in their minds.
Few recent movies have reconciled the difference between those distant shores with the same tenderness that “Sentimental Value” achieves by the end of its soul-melting final sequence (though Charlotte Wells’ more haunted but equally poignant “Aftersun” comes to mind). Even fewer have so elegantly literalized how the love that parents are able to share with their children — and vice versa — can be limited by their ability to express it. Almost none have more beautifully explored the role that making art, which is to speak without talking, can play in facilitating that process.
In the Borg house, Nora would always have to put an ear up to the old stove pipes if she wanted to hear people say their truths. As a girl, she thought of those pipes as the innards of a house that she always managed to be alive, and Trier’s signature voiceover — which continues to epitomize the goosebump effervescence of his cinema — introduces us to the structure as if it were a character with thoughts and feelings of its own. The house likes to be full. It doesn’t enjoy silence. It’s splintered down the middle in a way that makes it seem as though it’s sinking in slow motion.
In the first of Trier’s films to operate as a family portrait instead of a more focused individual profile, the Borg house will come to assume the gravity of a dying star that gives meaning to the constellation of people who are pulled ever closer towards its orbit. By the time Trier and Eskil Vogt’s dazzling screenplay arrives at a final scene whose power is all the more immense because viewers will see it coming a mile away, we’re so familiar with the house’s energy and layout that any change to it lands with the force of a wrecking ball.
“Sentimental Value” starts and ends with Nora’s home, but this is no claustrophobic chamber drama. Gustav insists that any movie worth its celluloid must “have the visuals,” and Trier — whose images DP Kasper Tuxen endows with a bittersweet texture you can feel on your skin — wouldn’t dream of disappointing him, even if Gustav threatens to use Netflix’s gaudy digital aesthetic as an excuse to betray his own cinematographer.
Segmented with blackouts and shot with an attentiveness that always feels alive to its own beauty, the story follows Nora deep into the narrows of her fraught personal life at the same time as it spends time with her married younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who was the child star of their father’s movies before she grew up to embrace her role as the more “practical” sibling. From there, Trier nimbly pivots to a crucial scene from one of Gustav’s films, a clip that somehow manages to convince us that he was a great director in the very same moment that it establishes why he’s fallen out of favor. (This is the kind of thing that movies about movies almost never get right, and “Sentimental Value” nails so hard it makes the rest of its drama all the more credible.)
A restoration of his classic is screening at the Deauville Film Festival, where American starlet Rachel Kemp — played by Elle Fanning, extraordinary in a needle-threading performance that requires her to be perfectly cast as someone who’s wrong for her role — sees it and decides that Gustav is the perfect director to help rescue her from the YA slop that made her famous. It’s taken 10 years, but we’ve finally gotten a movie that looks at “Clouds of Sils Maria” from the same distance that “Clouds of Sils Maria” looked at “Twilight.”
Cut to: Rachel showing up at the Borg house in Oslo to begin rehearsing the role that Gustav had written for his daughter, which inevitably triggers a certain vertigo for Nora, even if Gustav isn’t trying to bait her. He’s not the most gracious man in the world (he once walked out in the middle of Nora’s “Medea” because he couldn’t stand the scenography, though I suppose that was after he had already walked out on her mother), but he isn’t deliberately cruel. Like the rest of the film around him, he’s often very funny. Indeed, the heartbreak of Skarsgård’s magnificent, career-defining performance — heartfelt but hulking, and always suspended between two different generations of hurt — is that Gustav feels a half-step removed from all of the pain he causes, as if he were just a conduit for it, innocently passing it along from a trauma that we’ll come to understand so well that it will seem as if we bore witness to it ourselves.
“Sentimental Value” takes several detours to explore the origins of Gustav’s pain, but each of them — some flashbacks, others wrapped up in a research project that Agnes embarks upon — ultimately serve to place the Borg family’s present-day crisis into sharper relief. To no one’s surprise, Reinsve is immaculately attuned to Trier’s energy, and “Sentimental Value” is carried by the manic frustration she brings to her part, which is as fun as it is freighted with crisis. Nora became an actress because she didn’t want to be herself, but when Gustav rehearses in the house with Rachel, she’s forced to watch an actress perform herself, and to hear her father offer someone else the warm insight and encouragement he was never around to share with his children.
Nora’s mom was a therapist, and her father directs like one, constantly turning Rachel’s questions around on her with a sly “What do you think?” And what does Nora think? In a film that is always as suggestive and open-ended as the swooning Terry Callier song that plays over its opening credits, a canny moment of directions offers our best hint: Nora thinks that her life has become the stuff of theater, and that her worst stage fright is the kind she’s always suffered while trying to play Gustav’s daughter.
Overflowing with life from the moment it starts, “Sentimental Value” nevertheless remains laser-focused on building toward an overlap where Nora, Gustav, and his mother might be able to commune with each other as clearly as the shared memories of the house where they all lived at some point in their lives. It’s the same overlap Gustav refers to as “a perfect sync between time and space,” and that Terry Callier sings about in the song that floats above the film’s opening credits. The road there will be rapturously lush with details, but also winding as hell and potholed with the absent mercy that Nora needs to show Gustav — and recognize within him — if they can ever hope to understand each other, or to preserve something more of Gustav’s mother than the pain she left behind.
Mercy, however, is not quite the same thing as forgiveness. Mercy asks for allowance, where forgiveness demands absolution. Mercy is a means, and forgiveness its ultimate end. Mercy is something to be performed, while forgiveness can only be granted. The distinction between the two may be subtle, but through the extraordinary grace of Trier’s filmmaking, which here revels in the transmutational power of filmmaking itself, “Sentimental Value” renders it larger than life.
Grade: A
“Sentimental Value” premiered in Competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. NEON will release it in theaters in the United States.
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