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.
There are multiple themes at play here - estranged parents and children, lingering trauma, the price of great art among them - and the film takes its time exploring them through the characters and their interactions. Skarsgard and Reinsve absolutely nail the chemistry of an absentee father whose own childhood was affected by trauma when his mother committed suicide in their home, and a severely damaged daughter who took the brunt of her parents' disdain for each other so Agnes wouldn't have to. Each of them says so much with body language and facial expressiveness that the script is able to convey their thoughts organically. Skarsgard will likely win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and it will be well-deserved, but both Lilleaas and especially Reinsve turn in stellar work as well.
Agnes's arc involves somewhat reluctantly letting her father back into her life but having serious reservations about it, prompting her to research her grandmother's past which included a couple of years in a Nazi prison where she endured brutal torture. Understanding her father's inherited generational trauma allows her to connect with him and begin to repair their relationship.
The filmmaking style here is gentle and fluid, the camera lilting its way across locations, calling to mind a bit of Malick's naturalistic style and Kubrick's visual passivity. Speaking of Kubrick, I couldn't help notice a bit of a parallel with Gustav. An acclaimed director who hasn't made a film in over a decade, who doubts he can get inside this new material the way he needs to (Kubrick famously abandoned his planned early 90s film about the Holocaust after realizing he couldn't do it justice), who has difficult relationships with his two daughters, the younger of whom previously worked on one of his films. Not sure if that was intentional, but it caught my attention.
Sentimental Value is a pretty fascinating triple-character study and a story that's identifiable to anyone who's experienced any sort of difficulty with a parent-child relationship, which I think is all of us. Bolstered by superb performances and a director with patience and confidence in his material, this is an easy recommendation.
I give the film ***1/2 out of ****.
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