Sentimental Value
Affeksjonsverdi

The Worst Person in the World director Joachim Trier and star Renate Reinsve reunite for this less whimsical, more Bergmanesque comedy-drama about two sisters, Nora (Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who reunite with their estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), an aging, narcissistic but charismatic Norwegian film director. The film largely revolves around their home in Oslo, which has been in the family for several generations and which Gustav plans to use as the primary location for his semi-autobiographical late-career comeback film. Nora is a successful but neurotic stage and TV actor who is surprised by her father's offer of the lead role in his upcoming project, a role he's written especially for her. When she turns it down, Gustav offers the part to an eager young Hollywood star (Elle Fanning).

It is difficult to imagine a better film coming out in 2025. Sentimental Value is about as perfectly realized as the pictures get these days. I'm not typically a fan of movies about film directors, as they are usually pretty self-indulgent. This, however, is not a movie about a film director; it's a movie about family dynamics, where the specificity of the father being a once-celebrated auteur works perfectly to capture and convey universal family themes. The character dynamics work in similar ways to Olivier Assayas's brilliant Clouds of Sils Maria from 2014, which took a potentially shallow story about the line-blurring relationship between an aging actress and her young assistant and made it profound. The ending of Sentimental Value echoes the wordless power of Keneth Longergan's Margaret in illustrating how sharing the experience of creating or viewing a work of art together can sometimes be more profoundly healing than years of therapy.

In Gustav Borg, the versatile, seventy-four-year-old Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård (known equilly for heavy dramas like Breaking the Waves, Goya's Ghosts, and Melancholia, fun stuff like The Hunt for Red October, Ronin, and Pirates of the Caribbean, and things in the middle like Good Will Hunting, Insomnia, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) gets a career-crowning role and delivers his best performance yet. With seeming effortlessness, he creates a man who is both infuriating and amusing; aware of how he presents and is received in the world, yet simultaneously lacking in self-awareness when it comes to his children. Reinsve, Lilleaas, and Fanning are equally wonderful in their scenes with him, with each other, and with the many other characters in this exquisitely rendered story of complex emotions that are difficult to express.

We are currently living through an epidemic of estrangement, with adult children encouraged by everything from social media to professional counselors to go "no contact" with parents who are far less "toxic" than Gustav Borg. The belief seems to be that one can reclaim power by cutting off the people who had the greatest influence over us during our formative years and are therefore the cause of all our problems. But, in far too many cases, going "no contact" amounts to surrendering one's agency to an all-powerful figure whom we can blame for the way we are, rewriting our childhood into a convenient narrative that aligns exactly with how we'd like to believe it went down rather than taking responsibility for the way we've been since reaching maturity and doing something about it. Sentimental Value offers an alternative to this dangerous trend, not by giving the audience a false happily-ever-after, but by exploring how important it is to confront and go through something with the people who have fucked us up, rather than simply cutting them out of our lives. Thus, in addition to how powerfully the subtle details of Trier and co-screenwriter Eskil Vogt's exquisitely crafted story unfold, this movie feels like a throwback to the time when cinema was made for adults who want to be challenged rather than adolescents who wish to be reassured.