IFFI 2025 | ‘Sentimental Value’ Film Review: Joachim Trier, You Are Dangerous

At some point this year, “Joachim Trier’s Summer” joined every cinephile’s collective cultural calendar, and I stopped pretending it wasn’t real. But here’s a petition to please scrap the “Joachim Trier Summer” and instead adopt the far more accurate “Summer of Catastrophic, Character-Building Heartbreak.”

The Norwegian filmmaker is back with his new awards contender, sentimental value (Originally Affectionsverdi), which landed on the Croisette earlier this year, and instantly turned into a festival monster, garnering a 19-minute standing ovation at Cannes. Trier won the Grand Prix, the first time that a Norwegian film has won this honor. It is also their follow-up to 2021 the worst person in the worldShe was reunited with Renate Reinsway alongside Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilias and Elle Fanning.

A scene from ‘Sentimental Value’ Photo Credit: Neon

sentimental value It is a layered drama about a once-famous director who returns to the house where he grew up to make a deeply personal film with his estranged daughters. Because of some inaccuracies in my own family history, I admittedly felt a mild twinge of caution. Was this the result of my long-delayed treatment, or was I going to spend the next few business days crying into my pillow? Stories like this can go in any direction.

The film begins its first moments with a flicker of a beautiful wooden house. Light, life and memories flood the old Borg family home, passing the years in a matter of minutes. The cubic, green-ringed residence is a landmark in the spirit of Oslo, filled with the relics of many generations. around which it pivots sentimental value Roams around. Trier has previously examined the personal storms that shape young adulthood, but here he steps into older, more fragile terrain. It’s a patient, intricately felt portrait of a family navigating a history they can’t quite afford to revisit, yet can’t manage to leave behind.

Gustav Borg, played by Skarsgård in a career-best role, returns home after the death of his ex-wife, and his once-acclaimed film director reputation leaves him behind. He abandoned his daughters in their childhood. He left his wife to resolve the sourness in their marital life. And now he reappears in the same house with the script taken from his mother’s suicide. Skarsgård imbues Gustav with a worn-out charm that sporadically protects his ego. His honesty shines through cracks that he rarely admits. His every gesture reflected the remorse he never learned to express.

The bright and vivacious Renate Reinsway plays eldest daughter Nora. A renowned stage actress, she is affected by a stage fright episode early in the film which Trier shapes with almost documentary alertness. His nervousness is wandering through the aisles backstage, and his body language oscillates between anger and collapse. Reinsway approaches his role with an intuitive, almost meta-commentary understanding of how performance can become a battleground. Behind every movement lies the absence of their own father. Even in the scenes where she is restrained, there is something permanently dividing her attention, as if she can’t stop hearing echoes in a room that no longer speak to her.

Agnes, played by the terrific Inga Ibsdotter Lilias, is more stoic on the surface. The younger daughter is now a mother who has molded her life into a manageable structure. The film pokes and prods at the cost of that stability. As a child, she acted in one of Gustav’s films in a rare interlude of closeness, which she recalls with confusion and longing. Lilias captures the pain of that memory without any sentimentality (pun intended). Her scenes proceed in a quieter counterpoint to Nora’s more forceful spirals, but seem much more powerful. Together they create a portrait of brotherhood shaped by the absence and careful tenderness of adults who once clung to each other in the dark.

A scene from ‘Sentimental Value’ Photo Credit: Neon

Trier’s film gives the house a different beat. On the walls there are impressions of debates heard through old pipes. It is described as alive in the essay on Nora’s childhood, and the narrative treats it as a structure with its own inclinations. It fills itself with presence, retreats into silence, and breaks through decades of stress. Caspar Tucson’s cinematography captures every angle and corridor with a clarity that never feels clinical. Scandinavian daylight fills the rooms with a soft glow, allowing the deep history to go almost unnoticed. Trier allows the House to speak for itself, but rarely speaks louder than the people struggling inside it.

When Gustav decides to shoot his new film there, old tensions resurface with alarming speed. He offers Nora the role of his grandmother. She refuses with anger heightened by years of neglect. Instead, he cast Rachel Kemp, an American star played by Elle Fanning. Rachel’s arrival adds a new layer of disorientation. He’s a mismatch for the role, yet his seriousness and curiosity loosen up the tone of the film somewhat. Trier outlines the family’s pain simply by her presence, without offering any revelations. Fanning plays Rachel with effortless gentleness. When she steps into a story that isn’t hers, she realizes, and her hesitations eventually melt away with grace.

Gustav directs like a therapist, working with his actors. He habitually answers Rachel’s questions with “What do you think?” Saying this he turns it around. Also, admiring his expressions, he had once refused his daughters. The language of filmmaking promises revelation, yet each attempt at candor is tailored, redirected, or cut to suit the story Gustav prefers. Trier sets out to dispel this recurring fetish for “capturing the truth” and that naïve belief in cinema-by-cinema.

A scene from ‘Sentimental Value’ Photo Credit: Neon

An actor (Fanning) playing an actor (Rachel) trying to be with a woman she never knew, rehearsing scenes within scenes, another actor (Nora) playing a role written for another actor (Reinsway), coached by a man who can’t articulate what he wants because he can’t cope with what’s written – the kind of thing Trier is practicing a version of emotional accuracy. The Chase watches this boundary-blurring impulse like a slowly befuddled meta-observer, with a dry humor that keeps slipping between intention and projection.

I’ve joked before about whether this movie will cure me or leave me with tears in my eyes, and the answer came in the most punning way with the sisters’ reconciliation. What ultimately unfolds between the two is the unspoken recognition that Gustav’s script was set against Nora’s life, not against the personal tragedy it claimed to uncover. It’s a solemn moment, with that eerie domestic stillness of every remembered childhood complaint, when Nora finally says the thing she’s been saying for years: “How did it happen? You got it right and I got it fucked up”, to which Agnes replies, “But our childhoods weren’t the same. I had you.”

Not good, Joachim. I am not well.

sentimental value develops with a remarkable emotional clarity that deepens from scene to scene. Trier has created one of his richest, most humane works. The performances are fantastic. Images settle in the memory with surprising ease. And the film’s closing cadence confirms its place among the year’s most poignant (read: crushing) cinematic experiences.

Sentimental Value screened at the ongoing 56th International Film Festival of India in Goa

published – November 23, 2025 06:52 PM IST