Sentimental Value

Friday March 13 @ 7 pm

Drama
2 hr 13 min – PG – Released 2025

Sentimental Value is a deeply moving family drama directed by Joachim Trier, featuring Stellan Skarsgård as a filmmaker seeking reconciliation with his estranged daughter, played by Renate Reinsve. The film explores complex family dynamics and the intersection of art and personal history, receiving praise for its emotional depth and strong performances.

The film opens with two theme-defining scenes. In the prologue, we’re introduced to a home that a child has reimagined as a character for an essay, wondering if it’s happier when its belly is full of life, asking if it feels pain when its window is slammed. In the scene that follows the title card, we meet an actress in the middle of a breakdown before her opening night. She tries to run away from the full house before bursting into her version of The Seagull. A family home and the Herculean effort of performance. History, memory, expression, art, trauma—they’re all woven through Trier’s breathtaking drama, a movie that recalls Ingmar Bergman more than any he’s made yet but also one that truly cements his status as one of the working masters. It’s a movie that sneaks up on you like great fiction, blending theme and character in a way that allows it to live in your mind after you see it, rolling around what it means to both the people in it and your own life.

Believability is so essential to the success of Sentimental Value. There has rarely been a film in which the family dynamic is more genuinely defined than in this one. Skarsgard, Reinsve, and Lilleas disappear into their roles, playing father, daughter, and sister so genuinely. As it always is, it’s in the small choices. There’s a hysterical bit in which Gustav buys some very inappropriate DVDs for his grandson, and the knowing laugh that Reinsve gives him is just wonderful. They follow the moment of unspoken joy with a cigarette, laughing and smiling as they do so. Strained relationships aren’t only defined by their strain. And it’s often when we stop talking that old bonds reform just a little bit. When Hollywood mistakenly thinks that fraught family dynamics are only one thing, it leads to melodrama. Trier and his performers understand this, defining their characters outside of their greatest emotional upheavals, making them all the more powerful.

Sentimental Value is largely a performance and screenwriting feat, which means the film’s remarkable craft is likely to go underrated. A minute here to lavish praise on the fluid cinematography of Kasper Tuxen and perfect editing from Olivier Bugge Coutté. Trier works with them to give a very talky film momentum for over two hours, granting the film a confident visual language without drawing too much attention to itself. The film is essentially broken up into chapters with hard cuts to black every few minutes, again giving it all the echo of great fiction unfolding in feature film form.

While not as stylistically radical as Trier’s last film, The Worst Person in the World, this layered family-centric drama (which was also written by Eskil Vogt) shares its ability to find fresh angles on sentiments you’d think that cinema would have exhausted by now. Chief among the previous movie’s revelations was its star, Reinsve, who recalls the laid-back, lived-in and yet entirely modern allure of Diane Keaton during Woody Allen’s peak years, mixed with an unpredictability that can feel positively radiant one second and practically inconsolable the next.

Overflowing with life from the moment it starts, Sentimental Value nevertheless remains laser-focused on building toward an overlap where Nora, Gustav, and his mother might be able to commune with each other as clearly as the shared memories of the house where they all lived at some point in their lives. It’s the same overlap Gustav refers to as “a perfect sync between time and space,” and that Terry Callier sings about in the song that floats above the film’s opening credits. The road there will be rapturously lush with details, but also winding as hell and potholed with the absent mercy that Nora needs to show Gustav — and recognize within him — if they can ever hope to understand each other, or to preserve something more of Gustav’s mother than the pain she left behind.

In every single way, Sentimental Value is a perfect movie. Every actor is giving the performance of a lifetime, the movie looks and sounds superb, and the slightly off-kilter structure weaves together an emotionally profound experience. It is an instant classic and will long be remembered as one of the greatest movies of its time.