Welcome back to the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com! Seven 2025 nominees down, three to go...
Today I'm looking at Joachim Trier's latest opus, Sentimental Value, a Norwegian family drama of strained parent-child relationships starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgard, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as a father and his two adult daughters who become reacquainted after the death of the mother. We learn via the film's engaging prologue that the parents spent a lot of time screaming at each other, severely damaging the older daughter Nora (Reinsve), who now has trouble getting close to anyone. The father (Skarsgard) left, only occasionally reconnecting with his children over the following decades, and not very successfully.
In the present, Nora is now an accomplished theater and television actress, her younger sister Agnes (Lilleaas) did some acting as a child, having starred in one of her father's acclaimed films, but has since left the business. The father Gustav has enjoyed a long directorial career but hasn't made a feature in fifteen years and now wants to reclaim the family home (which technically on paper still belongs to him). Not only that, he's written a new screenplay, the best of his career, and wants Nora to star in it. But Nora rejects the olive branch, refusing to even read the script, and Gustav ends up instead casting famous American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), while also agreeing to several artistic compromises in order to get Netflix to finance the project.