Sentimental Value
aka Affeksjonsverdi First screened and reviewed in November 2025
Director: Joachim Trier. Cast: Renate Reinsve, Stellan skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning, Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud, Øyvind Hesjedal Loven, Anders Danielsen Lie, Jesper Christensen, Lars Väringer, Lena Endre, Cory Michael Smith, Catherine Cohen. Screenplay: Joachim Trier. In Brief:
Always well-acted but initially jumpy. Reveals stronger, deeper projects as it goes. Smart on family and on art.
VOR:④
Trier works from copious precedent (among his films, others' films, plenty of literature and drama), but tone, structure, and effect feel unique.
So, to answer my own question, apparently this is what I want from Joachim Trier: an affectionate but icy, admiring but skeptical, orderly but fragmented look at how art supplies people with a means of communication they would otherwise lack, even as art can simultaneously skew and sunder communication in all kinds of ways, including with oneself.
I had several of my usual Joachim Trier complaints on the way in, and at this point I am begging him to stop with the rat-a-tat, scene-setting prologues and the declamatory needle drops from his prized CD collection. The slow pan over that single but drastic crack in the Foundation of the FAMILY! HOME!! could have been my exit ramp from the movie if I were in a grouchier mood. But Sentimental Value, a title nearly as misleading as The Worst Person in the World, smartly wrong-footed my expectations as often as it affirmed them, and not one of the four main characters failed to surprise me in important ways by the time their story concludes.
I think Stellan Skarsgård deserves all the "performance of his career" accolades he is collecting; his ability to play one thing with his line reading, another with his face, and yet another with his eyes is a special effect that keeps on giving, sometimes opening up the character to us and other times slamming a series of doors at once. The people in his orbit visibly have the same experience many times on screen. Renate Reinsve is also wonderful—much stronger and slyer, I think, than in Worst Person, and I liked how the screenplay managed to present her forthrightly as the main protagonist, then allow her to spin off into outer rings of action in a way that Hollywood would probably never allow. I wasn't sure where we'd wind up with her by the final act, and even the very last shot struck me as equally likely to go either of two, basically opposed directions. It's a beauty of an ending, and I applaud the choice.
Not everything in Sentimental Value is smooth or subtle. I still wish that editor Olivier Bugge Coutté, a champ at those compressed montages that Trier likes so much, would bring a similar gift for concision and rhythm to the bigger picture. But struggles in this department are maybe more Trier's responsibility; Beginners, Coutté's collaboration with the similarly montage-inclined Mike Mills, is an absolute beauty of overall cadence and cohesion. The younger sister's thread feels a bit under-resourced in the middle hour, and the family home never quite took off for me as a character in Sentimental Value, as major parts of the script clearly intend.
Still, for a movie that launches with an awkward trio of beginnings, Sentimental Value steadily builds in strength and has cleverer cards up its sleeve than I'd surmised, from the plainspoken wisdom of a character other films would treat as a stooge, to the peremptory closure of a romantic subplot just when it seems primed to fluoresce, to the palpable chill of mortality that wafts through more and more of Skarsgård's scenes, without ever feeling overdone. Plus, any film with an excellent Gaspar Noé joke or an equally great Lasse Hallström crack is worth savoring, and this one's got both! Grade:B+
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
