Nora (Renate Reinsve), despite becoming a rising theatrical star, begins to suffer a bout of stage fright ahead of her debut as Nina in a production of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull. In addition to balancing her affair with Jakob (Anders Danielsen Lie), her married colleague, her mother, Sissel, passes away during the rehearsal period and Nora, along with her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), must begin to clean up their childhood home ahead of the arrival of their absconded father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård). Gustav, too, is struggling in his creative career as an auteur filmmaker who has fallen out of favor with the industry. When Nora declines the leading role of Karin, Gustav’s mother, he instead offers the role instead to Rachel (Elle Fanning), an American actress.

Joachim Trier debuted Sentimental Value or “Affeksjonsverdi” in its native Norwegian at the 2025 edition of the Cannes International Film Festival where it was picked up by Neon. The film reunites Trier not only with frequent muse Reinsve in front of the camera, but also with cowriter Eskil Voght on the page, cinematographer Kasper Tuxen behind the lens and Olivier Bugge Coutté in the editing suite. Sentimental Value came out of Cannes with the Grand Prix, a price that would be the film’s first of many laurels across the festival circuit and well on its way to a series of Oscar nominations across multiple categories and various craft and critical accolades.

Running 133 minutes, the film opens with voiceover narration by Bente Børsum explaining how Nora, as a child, wrote an essay from the perspective of the family home as it stood witness to everything ranging from celebrations, arguments through to apologies, and the mundanity of everyday life. The extended sequence lays down the history of this family across a montage that gives the sensation not unlike flipping through a photo album, albeit as if in a dream as many of the faces remain out of frame or out of focus. This framing is reminiscent of both Robert Zemeckis’ Here (2024) which follows the history of a plot of land from the beginning of time through to 2024, focusing primarily on a contemporary family that passed the home down from post-World War II era to present day, but also of Mascha Schilinski’s The Sound of Falling (2025); a fellow Cannes competition title with Sentimental Value that follows the inhabitants of a German farmhouse from the 1910s through to the 2020s, specifically in the dreamlike quality of this opening sequence. Ultimately, Trier is not interested in developing this common ground theme beyond using it as the staging device to start his paternal reconciliation piece with, but the ghosts that inhabit the house, specifically Karin, who died by suicide after enduring torture at the hands of the Nazis, loom heavy over the melodramatic action of the film, tamping these high emotions back down to earth and into the confines of these four walls which have overseen generations of life and death.

Looking at what is on screen, Sentimental Value plays out like a domestic drama and is at its best when it chronicle Gustav trying desperately to make amends with his daughters and regain a place in their lives. It takes some time before Skarsgård makes his entrance into the film, but the idea of him far precedes him so that when he does step into the house which is in mourning of Sissel, it is as if a crystal heirloom has fallen from a shelf and shattered. The world keeps on turning, but there is an immediate and uneasy weight that is tangible to us in the audience as he looks over at us from the doorway, through the proscenium arch of the hallway, until finally his quiet gaze pierces the screen and punctures a hole in our chest so that our heart can more easily sink into our stomach, landing with a thud. It is wordless moments such as this that make Sentimental Value an intoxicating watch as Trier and Voght tangle with the messy emotions that we tend to keep buried and gloss over in our own lives in order to keep the peace but are nonetheless present. Unfortunately, the pair get lost in the allure of meaty characters and juicy dialogue, and while audiences are made privy to the skeletons buried away across the various closets of the family home, this topping into melodrama while the craft of the film stays quite grounded creates a wide disparity between what we are seeing on screen versus the drama we are watching unfold with Fanning caught somewhere in the middle and being pulled wildly in all directions.

Because everyone in this film is a quietly tragic character, Sentimental Value is an actor’s showcase through and through, further propelled into favor by performers and creatives alike as it spends it time entrenched with an artistic microcosm that is struggling to stay true and relevant in a rapidly changing landscape. This is made a more personal struggle in the film as Gustav brings Rachel into the fold, letting her in on some of the darker moments of the family history so that she can portray his mother in his next film; a deeply personal piece of which only Netflix would cough up the money to fund. It is not entirely fair to put the failures of the page onto Fanning’s shoulders as she does well enough with the part, but she becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back and every scene we spend with her is less time we can become invested in the strained triptych at the center of the film. Fanning, though, does excel in the role of a woman not welcome to be there, and as she begins to study the family to inform her role in Gustav’s film, she becomes out entry point into the drama and she, along with Trier and Voght revel in making us feel similarly unwelcomed in the film.

It is an odd approach to take for a film that at once wants to be deeply felt while also being so standoffish with its audience, but in a broad sense it works well even if it does mean that audiences can find themselves emotionally detached by the end of the narrative. Despite the classical trappings of a European drama from the 1960’s of which Sentimental Value certainly feels to be a great grandchild of, Trier’s film is too meticulous that they overwhelming emotions of it all pass over us while we focus in on the details. The film more or less bookends itself with Nora, this time working on traditional soundstage instead of a new age theatre stage, and though the words on the page and the implications of what is happening are, at the core, profound, it is a muddied landing as we have already checked out near the start of the third act. It is a real shame because Trier does try to recover the narrative which he strayed too far away from though the inclusion of Rachel, but it is too little too late, and the film concludes more with a sigh of relief than the intended breath of catharsis.