SENTIMENTAL VALUE
Directed by: Joachim Trier
Starring: Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Reinsve, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning
Certificate: 15
Released: 26 December 2025
Rating: 9/10
There’s an epidemic of daddy issues abroad in cinemas right now. Last month, Noah Baumbach cast George Clooney as the beloved Hollywood icon Jay Kelly, desperately spending his autumn years in pursuit of the grown children he neglected in his youth. This month three new movies reckon in their own ways with the legacies of doomed dads, dead dads, and plain old despairing dads.
The richest of these is Sentimental Value, the latest film by the Norwegian laureate of black existential comedy, Joachim Trier. The Worst Person in the World may have been retrospectively packaged as the last instalment in his "Oslo Trilogy," but it is clear by now that the patient cartography of that city’s light, streets, and lost souls is a lifetime project for Trier.
This time, the focus is one very specific, gabled, storied, cracked, and creaking family home in Oslo’s elegant West End. It is a house garlanded with generational trauma, lovingly annotated with the heights of growing children on doorframes, where the antique stovepipes serve as an unofficial intercom.
The matriarch has died and, after many years in self-imposed exile, the father returns, attempting to make good on all his unfinished business. Fresh from his turn as the OG interstellar dark dad Vladimir Harkonnen in Dune, Stellan Skarsgård plays Gustav, an auteur of grand international reputation but diminishing creative returns. Skarsgård is magnificent here with a gravitational pull that is both seductive and repulsive. He is vainly trying to reconcile with his two grown daughters: the mercurial actress, Nora, played by the scintillating Renate Reinsve, and Agnes, a more reticent but no less troubled historian.
Gustav’s peace offering is a screenplay with a part written specifically for Nora, venturing deep into the dark basement of their shared history. It is his attempt to direct his way back into her affections. When Gustav is rebuffed by Nora he replaces her, casting Elle Fanning’s Rachel instead, a beam of Hollywood sunshine cutting through the Norwegian gloom.
Fanning is remarkable, playing Rachel with an earnest, wide-eyed openness. She represents the promise of a clean slate, which is exactly what Gustav thinks he needs to reset his legacy. But Reinsve’s performance is the film’s centre of gravity. If Worst Person was about the flightiness of youth, this is about the stasis of resentment. She makes her resolute fucked-upness compelling - a sane, defensive response to a man who has spent his entire life turning people into scripts and family dinners into "scenes."
Can the work ever outweigh the damage? In Jay Kelly, Baumbach offered a very Netflix answer - just look at the rapturous audience lapping up Jay’s career highlights reel. Trier’s is a more vexedly Scandinavian and unsentimental answer: art isn’t feel-good therapy but a very tattered and broken hallelujah.
