Sentimental Value

A red wooden house on the edge of Oslo, its paint long since threaded with cracks: that is where Joachim Trier begins — and he turns the crumbling building into an image of a family that stopped being one long ago. The father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), a celebrated director and ageing bohemian, returns after decades to the two daughters he once left for his career. Nora (Renate Reinsve), now an actor herself, refuses more than anyone to meet him halfway. All the more so when he sets out to film his latest screenplay with her. Between loaded glances and eloquent silences, a chamber piece unfolds about the invisible inheritance of an unusual clan of artists.

The Norwegian director Joachim Trier stages this double-bottomed family portrait with a painful clarity that recalls, not by accident, Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece “Autumn Sonata”. There too, the question of whether art can stand in for a life lived opened the wounds of a parent-child relationship. And so “Sentimental Value” becomes a meditation on what parents leave to their children — and on art as the last language available when every other way of speaking has broken down. An elegant, moving drama, awarded the Grand Prix of the Jury at Cannes this year, which hands the brilliant Stellan Skarsgård one of the most striking roles of his late career.

Shown at the 2025 edition of Around the World in 14 Films, Berlin.

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