Home and family — the burden and the beauty of its love.
Sometimes the past catches up with us in the most unexpected ways. Sometimes it crashes in like a broken dam. Sometimes it creeps up behind us and slowly wraps itself around our neck.
Joachim Trier shines again by paving the way into the most fragile and profound corners of one's heart.
Following the success of The Worst Person in the World (2021), Trier returns to Cannes with his newest feature, Sentimental Value — joined again by Renate Reinsve, whose performance in the former earned her the Best Actress award there.
Sentimental Value quickly became the talk of Cannes after its premiere. It is written with such tenderness, sensitivity, and sincerity that you can’t help but surrender your heart to it. This is a film about pain and healing, resentment and forgiveness, past and present. But above all, it is a film about family and its love.
Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), a once-successful film director, reenters the lives of his two daughters — Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) — after the death of their mother, his ex-wife. He comes bearing a script and offers the lead role to Nora, now a celebrated stage actress. Having left the family when the girls were young, Gustav’s sudden reappearance and interest are not welcomed by Nora. When she turns down the part, he offers it instead to Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), a young American actress from Hollywood.
The two sisters must now confront their complicated relationship with their estranged father — and with the stranger, Rachel — as Gustav insists on shooting the film in their childhood home, all while navigating their own lives.
We follow each character’s path and slowly uncover the scars of their childhoods. Nora, a successful stage actress, lives alone and struggles with relationships, anxiety, and self-sabotage. She harbors deep resentment toward her father’s abandonment and incompetence. Agnes, in contrast, has settled into a family life with her husband and son. Yet she still carries pain from her father’s manipulative attention when she starred in his film as a child. Gustav is not exempt from this cycle. His own mother died by suicide in the same house, and whether he admits it or not, this trauma has haunted his life and his work. In this deep water, Rachel is both a contrast and a mirror to the family's unresolved pain.
The film opens with a beautiful sequence narrated by an essay Nora wrote as a child. It's about the house and how it loved the noise, the people, the lives, as if it were a character with sentiments of its own. As time advanced in the montage, the house and its people changed. Silence and dispute replaced the once cheerful giggles. This solid opening becomes even more meaningful as the story unfolds.
Sometimes the past catches up with us in the most unexpected ways. Sometimes it crashes in like a broken dam. Sometimes it creeps up behind us and slowly wraps itself around our neck.
We don’t choose our families; our norm is simply the way we live. We love our parents and our families by default, but that love can carry a heavy burden. We find ourselves reflected in each other, in their best and their worst. Even when we spend our lives trying to carve our own identity, we remain a consequence of our past. The characters’ feelings toward their lives and each other are so deeply human, one will inevitably find echoes of oneself within them.
This story by Trier and Eskil Vogt came from such a private and intimate place. It went above and beyond when the cast matched it with their formidable acting. All four lead actors gave nuanced, heartfelt portrayals. We can't help but connect and empathize with them, in both their happiness and their agony. This collaboration allowed the viewer to hold complex, sometimes contradictory emotions all at once.
The score accompanied the film with grace, whether in its loneliness or its tension. The camera moved with intimacy and intention — every aspect of the film came together to serve the story. Together, it carried so much real emotional weight. In a mere 132 minutes, you experience familiar feelings that may sometimes be heartwarming, sometimes ugly, other times joyous, regretful, affectionate, or agonizing… Despite the emotional tone, there are moments of clever humour, such as little inside jokes for cinephiles to chuckle at together in the cinema. Don't miss out on the gentle nods to theater either, like the reference to Chekhov’s The Seagull, which, in retrospect, echoed the film.
When the credits rolled, all I wanted was to stay in my seat and just sit and process it all. The 19-minute standing ovation and the Grand Prix win at Cannes were well deserved. The art of cinema in Trier’s hands told the fragile, often unspoken sentiments that live in so many families. The heavy weight of love still sits on my shoulders as I write this, days after my screening. How lucky are we to have artists who can provoke emotions this grand…
Sentimental Value premiered in Competition at the 2025 Festival de Cannes. It will be released in France in August. NEON will distribute the film in the United States, with dates yet to be announced.
Photos : Cannes Film Festival/Kasper Tuxen and Variety
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