It’s increasingly unusual to see a movie that’s just about people being people — no high concept, no mystery, nothing designed to generate social media chatter. Norwegian director Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World) excels at making such films, and they’re always absorbing. His latest, Sentimental Value (cowritten with Eskil Vogt), won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and is considered an Oscar contender. See it at Montpelier’s Savoy Theater (ongoing); or at four Burlington screenings on Wednesday and Thursday, December 3 and 4, 4 and 7 p.m., presented by the Vermont International Film Foundation at the Film House at Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center.
The deal
Sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) grew up in an old house built and continuously inhabited by the family of their father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård). A renowned film director with a roving eye, Gustav abandoned the family before his daughters were grown. Agnes is now happy with a family of her own, while Nora has become a well-known stage and TV actress who struggles with paralyzing anxiety.
When their mother dies, Gustav returns to ask a big favor of Nora. He wants her to star in his first film in 15 years: the story of a young mother who dies by suicide. And he wants to film it in their ancestral home, where he lost his own mother at age 7 in precisely that way.
Nora wants nothing to do with the project or her father. But American movie star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) meets Gustav at a retrospective and is so taken with the sensitivity of his work that she signs on, bringing Netflix on board with her.
The family home becomes a stage on which past collides with present and truth with fiction. As the sisters clear out their belongings, Gustav rehearses the glamorous outsider Rachel for a role that he insists is not based on his actual mother.
Will you like it?
There’s something beguilingly 19th-century-novelistic about centering a story on a family home. Sentimental Value opens with a narrator (Bente Børsum) reading an essay in which the younger Nora whimsically imagines the house as a person, inviting us to see it as a character as the camera explores its rooms — and reveals a fatal, obviously symbolic rift running through the structure.
That’s a foretaste of things to come, because Trier never does nostalgia or whimsy without death and heartbreak. Don’t confuse him with Sweden’s Lasse Hallström, who gets a knowing name-check in the script as Scandinavia’s most internationally bankable modern filmmaker.
From its charming prologue, Sentimental Value plunges us straight into the turbulent psyche of the adult Nora, as her panic attack delays a high-profile opening night with a full house. It’s a scene that anyone who’s done theater will find nightmarishly stressful. And Reinsve, who can be winsome and tragic and everything in between, plays it superlatively.
We soon learn that Nora, who describes herself to her married lover (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie) as “80 percent fucked up,” uses her art as a safety valve for her unmanageable emotions. Gustav does something similar, coyly refusing to admit his script is autobiographical when it’s clearly an effort to grapple with the unknowns of his past and present.
Father and daughter are more alike than Nora wants to admit — a spiritual kinship highlighted by their stark difference from the celebrity who stumbles into their midst. Fanning is funny and touching as the over-earnest American ingenue. Horrified when Gustav casually reveals she’s standing on his mother’s death site, she begs him to explain why he didn’t ditch the house and its bad vibes long ago.
Trier tells the story in episodic scenes that start and end abruptly — an approach that may initially seem artless. But these blunt, unheralded transitions work to confuse the boundaries of reality and fiction until they blur entirely. In one scene of Nora weeping in a bedroom, for instance, the camera eventually pans out to reveal she’s on a set.
Sentimental Value raises provocative questions about what it means to make art-house cinema in the age of streaming, as well as exploring how artists cannibalize their own experience. The Borg family doesn’t ditch bad vibes — they live with them and use them, though sometimes they find a degree of peace.
Quieter than the histrionic Nora, younger sister Agnes is just as important to the story, and Lilleaas’ radiant performance anchors a scene in which the sisters come to terms with each other and their past. Sentimental Value has no shocking twists, no water-cooler moments, but that scene demonstrates why it doesn’t need them. As sophisticated as it’s sentimental, the movie will send you out misty-eyed and thoughtful.
If you like this, try…
The Worst Person in the World (2021; Kanopy, Tubi, rentable): Reinsve also starred in Trier’s previous film, about a free-spirited millennial facing maturity, which snagged two Oscar nominations.
Oslo, August 31st (2011; Kanopy, MUBI, rentable): The house at the center of Sentimental Value also appears at a key moment in Trier’s portrait of one day in the life of a young man (Lie) struggling with recovery from opiate addiction.
This article appears in Dec 3-9 2025.
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