In Sentimental Value, there’s a scene where the veteran filmmaker Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, explains to his newly discovered lead actress, Rachel Kemp, how his mother hanged herself using the very same stool being used. Poor Rachel is overwhelmed by the extreme intimacy with which Borg confides in her about his past. This seemingly trauma-laden relic is later revealed to be a random IKEA stool, when Borg’s young daughter Agnes mentions to him this exchange. One of the many gags that lightens the dramatic flow of Joachim Trier’s Grand Prix–winning film, the stool can be read as an extension of the gap between Trier’s intentions and the mental projections through which the audience engages with the story.
Rather than a main character, as was the case in The Worst Person in the World, it is an old, picturesque family house in Oslo around which the stories of Sentimental Value gravitate — a curious similarity the film shares with another 2025 Cannes Comp title, Mascha Schilinski’s The Sound of Falling, even though both works take markedly different sensory and emotional approaches to spatial memory and generational transmission.
Nora — a stage actress whose name alludes less to some predestined meaning than to Trier’s choice to adorn his film with rather-too-obvious references to Ibsen (and later to Chekhov and even Bergman) — and her younger sister, Agnes, grew up in this house, as we learn from the voiceover narrator. During their childhood, it appears that the girls’ father, Gustav — who inherited the house from his family — left them. Upon their mother’s passing, he casually decides to reconnect with his estranged daughters. Nora is furious, while Agnes just wants to avoid drama.
His daughters are not the only object of Gustav’s reconnection efforts. A veteran filmmaker with no films in the last 15 years, he is preparing for a comeback with a script he wrote with Nora in mind for the lead. Grumpy and dissatisfied to such an extent that his character lends a comedic tone to the film, Skarsgård’s Borg channels more of an oddball Werner Herzog figure than the austerity of a Bergman protagonist. For instance, in a part cringey, part humorous moment, he gifts The Piano Teacher and Irreversible to his grandson.
Renate Reinsve, whose Nora is constantly at odds with her career-driven, irresponsible father, isn’t really given the chance to deepen her character. After a chaotic, whirlwind opening sequence — where the “hot mess” act before an important premiere makes it feel like she hasn’t quite shaken off Julie, her character from The Worst Person in the World — she mostly engages in a series of passive-aggressive confrontations with her father, in which things keep being left unsaid.
After Nora’s initial rejection, Gustav tries his luck with the aforementioned American actress Rachel Kemp, whom he meets at a film festival — possibly Deauville. Even though her character is meant to embody the zealous and superficial American star, Elle Fanning delivers a surprisingly charming and heartfelt performance. She’s written to be sincere in an irritating way, and Fanning nails it — especially in the scenes where she clumsily tries to unearth Gustav’s past, and that of his mother, in her slightly invasive attempts to fully grasp the ethos of her role.
In Sentimental Value, Trier returns to the dysfunctional family dynamics he previously explored in Louder Than Bombs. Within the narrative economy of the film, the relationships between Gustav, Nora, Agnes, Gustav’s late mother in absentia, and even Rachel — who functions as a stand-in for Nora — gradually come to resemble a web of loosely woven threads, culminating in a predictable outcome in which art and cinema serve as the sublimation of trauma and as a path toward healing and reconciliation — an ending whose prosaism and familiarity are less problematic in themselves than the apparent lack of stylistic and formal consideration brought to the use of the cinematic medium in expressing them.
It’s beyond doubt that Joachim Trier is, a priori, a cinephile filmmaker, and his cinema has always been imbued with an array of influences, homages, and reworkings — as if the images themselves were inhabited by other cinematic visions. Inhabiting the image — Trier would often frame his spaces with such evocative power that, even long after the film had ended, one could still mentally visualize and feel the characters lingering in their habitus, as if they were latent images. It’s precisely this kind of sensory aftereffect that Sentimental Value seems to lack — at least on the surface. The Borg family mansion merely resembles an artificial studio set piece, shot with the sterile detachment of an Architectural Digest video ad. Is this truly the house meant to represent the memory-laden, regretful past that Nora cannot let go of and that Gustav tentatively revisits? Are we meant to believe in the authenticity of the attachment these characters seek — in one another and in the past? Or could Trier, in fact, be intentionally employing this flatness and sense of uprootedness to convey the unbridgeable gap that separates father and daughter, and their respective understandings of love and life?
Sentimental Value is either an emotionally disproportionate, tone-deaf dramedy, or an ambiguous and intelligent meta-text that playfully and persistently gestures toward the very “sentimental value” the audience is meant to seek within it. A malleable piece of work, the film echoes the dual suggestiveness of that IKEA stool Gustav jokes about — a curious quality that may be the one and only virtue by which the film will be remembered.
[Author’s note: Although Sentimental Value includes various nods to Bergman’s cinema, I kept thinking of Wild Strawberries throughout—only later did I realize that Victor Sjöström’s character was also named Borg, when I took a brief look at the film’s Wikipedia page. Curiously, the page also explained the meaning of the film’s original Swedish title, Smultronstället. Idiomatically, the wild strawberry patch signifies a hidden gem—a place of personal or sentimental value, often little known, it read. Pure coincidence? Direct reference? Either way, I had found yet another IKEA stool in the film.]
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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