LFF 2025: Sentimental Value
Joachim Trier directs a miraculous family drama
Festival Review: Sentimental Value (dir. Joachim Trier)
Plot in a nutshell
Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) are confronted with all sorts of feelings, memories and anxieties when their estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a film director, returns home for their mother’s funeral. Gustav wants Nora for his latest project while Agnes tries her best to help them reconnect.
“A tragi-comic slice-of-life film with an everlasting aftertaste that pulls all the right strings” is how I described Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (2022) when I wrote about it the 9th best film I saw that year. Not only do those some same sentiments ring true for his follow-up, but he has - like all great artists - outdone himself. Sentimental Value is my personal favorite film of the London Film Festival so far, and is currently in the lead to end up as my favorite film of 2025.
Like every deeply layered story, there is so much going on between the lines, powered by the emotional undercurrents of the three central relationships between the two siblings and their dad. The film is also about a house that has seen generations of Borgs come and go, filled with memories of great joy and great sorrow alike. The opening, with a narrator describing 6-year-old Nora’s letter she wrote where she imagined herself as her house, is impossibly moving.
Sentimental Value is also a story of how artists use their art as a means to communicate with each other, or with themselves. Which one imitates which one again, life or art? Through this exploration, the film also, miraculously, manages to be a movie about the pains and joys of making movies. As the story unfolds, Gustav’s and Nora’s journeys take unexpected turns through which we get an exclusive insight into the artistic process. Whether it’s Nora’s love-and-hate relationship with stage fright, or Gustav circumnavigating the pangs of a Netflix production as a 70-year-old filmmaker who hasn’t made a feature film in 15 years.
Every thread, some of which take us back to Gustav’s childhood, is beautifully connected to create a profoundly moving family portrait. Similar to the maturity on display in It Was Just An Accident, every ordinary moment is colored with emotional complexity of what it means to be human. It’s no surprise that Trier won the Grand Prix for Sentimental Value, the second biggest award given in Cannes.
The performances of the three main actors are out of this world, and Elle Fanning who has a significant role to play as a Hollywood star, more than holds her own. But the standouts, it must be said, are Reinsve and Skarsgård. All of their scenes, especially the ones they share, are stunning examples of subtextual acting. Expressions and microgestures of regret, angst, hope, despair, and love that move mountains.
Trier has directed and written something truly special here. As Sean Penn said when he introduced it at the Lumiere Festival a few days ago, it’s “everything I want cinema to be”.
When is Sentimental Value getting released?
The UK release date is December 26.
hi! i wanted to see what people thought of the film, i haven’t been able to watch it yet because it doesn’t release here in germany until dec 4, but it was cool reading how you focused on the layers in the relationships and the whole artistic side of it!