Sentimental Value

The Architecture of Forgiveness

Going back into the house you grew up in can feel physically strange, like your body remembers routes your mind no longer wants. *Sentimental Value* understands that right away. Joachim Trier opens by turning an old Oslo villa into an active witness to a family's long, quiet damage. There is a literal crack running up the foundation and into the walls, which sounds almost laughably obvious when you describe it. But Trier doesn't use the house as a blunt symbol. He uses it as a vessel for everything this family cannot say without splintering.



Nora (Renate Reinsve) first appears backstage at a theater in the middle of a savage panic attack before curtain. Reinsve is incredible right away. She asks a co-star to kiss her, then to slap her, reaching for any sensation that might drag her back into her body. It's chaotic, humiliating, and instantly recognizable as human. Soon after, her mother dies, and that loss pulls her estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) back into Nora and her sister Agnes's (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) orbit. Gustav is a once-revered film director who abandoned his family for work and ego, and Skarsgård smartly refuses to make him a simple monster. He is grand, needy, pathetic, and weirdly commanding—a man who can articulate the most delicate shades of feeling on a set and still talk to his daughters as though he's giving notes after a disappointing rehearsal.



His idea of reconciliation is both terrible and perfectly in character: cast Nora in his comeback film, a script drawn directly from their family's history and set inside the old house. She refuses him outright. So he replaces her with Rachel, an eager young Hollywood actress played by Elle Fanning, whether out of spite, panic, or some muddled mix of both. Fanning is doing excellent work here. She plays a performer who is plainly talented and still not quite right, which is harder than it looks. The film's emotional center arrives when Rachel delivers a key monologue and Nora later reads the exact same lines. Fanning gives the speech the clean, polished confidence of a movie star. Reinsve, with swollen eyes and collapsed shoulders, barely seems to perform it at all. The words leave her like breath leaving a bruised lung.



Trier and Eskil Vogt have always been interested in unstable selves—*The Worst Person in the World* made that theme feel almost buoyant—but *Sentimental Value* is older, heavier, more corroded. Bergman hangs over it, especially in the close-ups Trier has described as having an "aggressive intimacy." The camera stays on Reinsve and Skarsgård long past the point of comfort, forcing us to watch them absorb what they've done to each other. It's uncomfortable on purpose. David Ehrlich at IndieWire wrote that the film is preoccupied with how "mercy asks for allowance, where forgiveness demands absolution." I'm not convinced Gustav earns either by the end. Whether that feels frustrating or truthful will depend on how much closure you expect from stories about family damage. What I couldn't shake was that house, and the feeling of people so trapped inside memory they're still waiting for someone else to call cut.