☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½
Sentimental Value (2025) – J. Trier
Aito claims not to
like movies, but when I was pondering what to watch, I asked him. He said he prefers character-driven drama to
plot-driven genre films (“anyone can write a superhero film”, he claims). After that, there seemed no other choice than
Sentimental Value, the Grand Prix winner from last year’s Cannes Film Festival
(second place to Jafar Panahi’s It was Just an Accident) and Best Foreign Film
at the 2025 Academy Awards. Actress
Renata Reinsve (who plays eldest daughter Nora Borg here) is having her time in
the sun, after success with director Joachim Trier’s earlier film, The Worst
Person in the World (2021), which I haven’t yet seen, and the 2026 Cannes Palme
d’Or winner, Fjord, directed by Romanian Cristian Mungiu – plus cult hit
Backrooms (2026; youngster Kane Parsons). She’s excellent here, playing an
unstable actress experiencing success on stage and TV who is approached by her
estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a world-famous director who has
not made a film for 15 years but wants her to star in a personal project he
hopes to get funded. They’ve made contact again at the funeral for her mother,
his ex-wife, but she still feels hurt by his long absence from her life. Her
younger sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), also starred in one of her
father’s films when she was a child but is unwilling to have her own son join
the cast of his latest venture, having felt her father’s attention dwindle as
soon as that film wrapped. Indeed, when
his daughter refuses to participate, he turns his attention to Hollywood
starlet Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) who attracts Netflix funding but requires
the film to be in English, rather than Norwegian (or Swedish; Borg is a
Norwegian who moved to Sweden as a child, but Skarsgård is Swedish and Reinsve is
Norwegian -- as is director Trier). As
far as character-driven drama goes, there is more than enough psycho-dynamically-speaking
for this cast to sink their teeth into (they do!) and Trier handles the unfolding
tensions with flair (and a nice use of music, for punctuation or transition).
Although it portends to be yet another film about making films, it is much less
invested in the craft of making films and much more invested in the family
relationships here (implying that we keep these relationships out of
sentimental value only, perhaps); that said, the title might just be a wink at audience
members looking for the kind of meta-commentary often found in films like these
– it hints at the healthy dose of sentimentality front-loaded in the film which
yields several cathartic moments and is tied up with a bow at the end. Trier clearly knows what audiences want – and
critics too. Worth your time.
