You can never truly know your parents. And Norwegian actor Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) is happy to keep it that way in regard to her father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård). A world-renowned filmmaker, he chose la vie bohème over domesticity and being present in her life ages ago; Nora and her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), have been estranged from him for years. Dad came and went as they were raised by their mom in an Oslo residence that’s been in the family for generations. From the outside, the place looks like like something out of a fairy tale, where a witch in the woods might plump up kids for a meal. But inside, it’s roomy yet cozy, a homey domicile filled with both bright memories, a rich history, and the faint echoes of a decades-old tragedy.
When Nora and Agnes’ mother dies, the siblings gather friends and loved ones in the home for a memorial. No one expects Gustav to attend. No one is happy to see him when he shows up, acting as if he’s merely been absent without leave for a fortnight or two. Even more surprising: Dad has an offer for Nora, who’s just come off a successful run in an avant-garde theatrical production. After a long creative dry spell, he’s finally written a new, very personal script. Would she star in it?
Nora says no way. Gustav accepts her answer and says goodbye. Some time later, Dad shows up once more at their house. He plans on shooting his latest opus there regardless of Nora’s refusal. Gustav has also cast a way-more-famous American movie actor named Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) to play the lead. The young A-lister met the older auteur at a film festival, and her sudden interest in the project equals funding. It’s not a coincidence that Gustav has forced Rachel to dye her hair to resemble his daughter. Nor that a major incident in the script mirrors the same aforementioned tragedy that occurred within these four walls, back when this lion in winter was just a boy.
The lines between life and art, truth and fiction, get mighty blurry in Trier’s emotionally expansive, extremely wry film, though the family drama itself is just a spine on which to hang any number of other fixations and preoccupations. You can break down this skateboarding champ turned major cinema figure’s best work into bare-bones synopses, and people will have a vague sense of what they’re walking into. Reprise, his 2006 cannonball of a debut, centers on two aspiring, competitive writers. Oslo, August 31st (2011), follows a man determined to take his own life. The Worst Person in the World (2021), which starred Reinsve and more or less turned her into one of those “overnight” sensations that feel like showbiz mythology, is a character study of a complicated woman. All of this is completely accurate.
What makes Trier’s movies so rich, so exhilarating, so vital, is the way he and his longtime screenwriter Eskil Vogt pitch these stories somewhere between a saga and an anecdote, fit-to-burst with lifelike textures, details and detours. This is part of Sentimental Value‘s prime currency. We don’t just get a tour of this old house — we meet it, hearing its thoughts courtesy of a school essay Nora once wrote (“what the house disliked more than noise was silence”) and watching its history unfold in vignettes that span WWII to the late 1980s. There are glimpses of a backstage farce, with Nora trying to use a quickie with her married stage-manager lover (longtime Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie) to quell a panic attack on opening night, then threatening to bolt.
Press junkets get satirically raked over the coals. So does Netflix, “TikTok trolls,” vapid Hollywood entourages and good old-fashioned arthouse narcissists. Both Lilleaas and Fanning add their own touches, with the latter once again reminding you that she’s one of best screen listeners working today. If there’s an opportunity for a stylish montage or a moody sequence set to a chic needle-drop — say, Roxy Music’s “Same Old Scene” or the soulful, increasingly popular “Nobody Knows” as done by the Youth for Christ choir — Trier will drop that needle posthaste. There’s formalism to burn here.
But all of the side business and genre flirtations remain at the service of coloring the characters, so loving and flawed and searching and fucked-up. Which is why, when you watch Trier and Vogt’s genuine, humanistic take on artistic freedom versus adult living — and the way consequences reverberate — you realize you’re getting something far more difficult to classify than just “dysfunctional parent drama.” Sentimental Value is essentially a double act between Skarsgård and Reinsve, and these two performers play off each other in a way that’s recognizable to anyone who’s struggled with paternal baggage, by which we mean everybody. It’s also using the prickly dynamic between father and daughter to explore how storytelling can both mask hurt and facilitate healing, and doing so in a way that goes way beyond heroes and villains. Not even a meta ending that pushes that idea to its logical breaking point can sour you on it. What you’re left with is one the best movies about how family means always having to say your sorry — and why, in the end, it’s better to forgive than forget.
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