Sentimental Value: When houses speak

In his multi-layered family drama ‚Sentimental Value‘, Norwegian director Joachim Trier allows spaces, memories and wounds to enter into dialogue with one another. A film about the ghosts of the past – and the unexpected freedom that arises when one confronts them. Awarded the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, it stands as one of Trier’s most resonant and luminously crafted works to date

‘I must see how I have formed myself, see whether I am a human being or merely the image of a human being.’

– Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House

It is rare for a director who seems to have already reached their zenith to shift it once again. ‚The Worst Person in the World‘ (2021) was such a zenith – a film that understood romantic comedy as a philosophical experiment and delved deeply into the existential turmoil of a young woman with a light touch. A work about the freedom that can only be found in those relationships in which one can simply be who one is. Sentimental Value picks up on precisely this idea – and drives it further into the heart of family history, into the realm of inheritance, guilt and speechlessness, with painful precision.

Once again, Joachim Trier works with his congenial co-writer Eskil Vogt, and once again Renate Reinsve takes centre stage – this time as Nora Borg, a daughter who wanted to escape her father’s magnetic pull and now, after her mother’s death, finds herself inescapably bound to him again. But while ‚The Worst Person in the World‘ was driven by the question of how to find oneself, Trier is now interested in how to finally get rid of – or integrate – the others we carry within us. ‚Sentimental Value‘ is his most multi-layered film to date, and perhaps his most truthful.

The premise is as simple as a fairy tale and as complicated as a Norwegian family chronicle: two sisters – Nora and Agnes (brilliantly quiet: Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) – have to deal with their father Gustav, an ageing film director who would rather work on his comeback than take responsibility for the past. Stellan Skarsgård plays this man with a combination of awkward dominance, fragile authority and profound failure that is almost physically painful. His gaze – somewhere between exhaustion, manipulation and longing for forgiveness – is one of the great moments of this cinema year.

But he is not the only one who speaks. The family home also raises its voice. Literally. Trier allows the space to formulate memories; he lets the daughter narrate from off-screen, then take on an authorial role, only to then plunge everything into Bergman-esque darkness. The narrative is a kaleidoscope, a family constellation in cinematic form: characters are driven mad, shifted, re-examined, and only when the perspectives are combined does the truth emerge that everyone wanted to avoid.

Above it all lies the invisible presence of the dead grandmother – both victim and perpetrator of a story that goes back not to Norway’s collaboration with the Nazis, but to the resistance against the occupiers. The transgenerational trauma, with its fluid shades of shame and depression, pervades the film like a cold draught: you can feel it without it having to be named. Trier’s mastery lies once again in his ability to tell the heavy with lightness and the light with depth.

As in ‚The Worst Person in the World‘, Oslo is a character in its own right: winding, bright in winter, surprisingly intimate. This time, Trier approaches the city like a damaged album in which pictures are missing and overlap in other places. The film moves between rooms as if between states of mind. And then there is the theatre – or rather the film within the film – which is not merely an artistic motif here, but the only place where these people can talk to each other at all. Art becomes a substitute vocabulary, a prosthesis that finally makes possible what seems impossible in everyday life: a language.

In this respect, Trier is reminiscent of Dag Johan Haugerud and his ‚Oslo Stories‘: the same precision, the same casual humour, the same humane gaze. Sentimental Value, however, is more sharply broken, more playful, more open in its reflection on its own means. At one point, Trier shows very directly what this film would look like if it were conceived in an American way – with the help of the wonderfully present Elle Fanning as Rachel Kemp. A meta-moment that demonstrates crystal clearly how differently regional film languages frame, evaluate and neutralise emotions.

The fact that Trier allows himself such breaks – hard cuts, fractions of a second of black screen, voice changes, ironic miniatures about Swedish uptightness – is an expression of astonishing sovereignty. None of it seems mannered. Everything is organic, breathing, necessary.

There are years when Scandinavian cinema seems to overflow with energy and inventiveness. This year belongs to the Norwegians, following Haugerud’s trilogy and now Trier’s film. If things continue like this, and cinema always knows more than we do ourselves, anticipating what is to come, it should come as no surprise if the Norwegians, perhaps the most surprising team to qualify for the 2026 Football World Cup, not only overtake Germany at the World Cup.

Because, as with the Norwegian football team, it’s not just the coach, the counterpart to the director, but the whole team, stars and non-stars alike: Renate Reinsve carries the film with that mixture of fragility and fiery self-assertion that already made ‚The Worst Person in the World‘ such an event. Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas complements her as her sister in a rare balance between two characters who do not mirror each other, but break each other. And Skarsgård... creates a father who is simultaneously perpetrator, victim, child and foreign body in his own life. A person you want to hug and slap at the same time.

As if in passing, Trier also draws a quiet but powerful parallel: The name Nora is, of course, no coincidence, as it is reminiscent of Nora from ‚'Et dukkehjem', whom Henrik Ibsen allowed to step out of the confines of a doll’s house. Here, too, the story begins with a cage of expectations, roles, guilt and duty. But this time, it is not just one woman who breaks free. In the end, all the protagonists – father, sisters, lovers, even the house itself – break out of their traditional constructs. Trier’s modernisation of Ibsen’s moment of liberation makes Sentimental Value not only a family and memory epic, but also a contemporary story of emancipation: tender, angry, hopeful.

'Sentimental Value' is a psychologically astute, deeply felt, darkly sparkling film. It is great cinema because it allows for ambiguity, does not preach hope, but makes it possible. A work that shows how family histories are functionalised, how they can heal – and how they continue to have an effect when no one speaks. And perhaps that is Trier’s most radical step: he still believes in catharsis. Even if it is made possible through the detour of the language of art, theatre and film. And he knows and shows congenially that this requires an important step beforehand: you have to go through the darkness to see the light.