Sentimental Value (2025) and its lack of sentimentality

Sentimental Value (2025) lets its characters suffer for the audience, but not for each other, leaving large chasms of space between them, where their narratives develop in a vacuum, waiting for their turn to play the supporting role in each other’s “moment.” And it is difficult to assign intimacy to a film’s characters’ dynamic when the film itself seems keen on leaving their relationships with each other untouched. The beating heart of this film is Nora (Renate Reinsve), but sometimes it’s also her father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard) or maybe it’s her younger sister Agnes (Inga Lilleaas), until cycling through their emotions feels tedious. Each of these characters yearn to reconnect with the other in such a private, internalized manner, that it feels like their emotional maturation happens in the fade-to-black transitions between scenes.

The trio’s family has a lot of history that takes place in their repetitively bequeathed mansion in Oslo, Norway. It is a home built with an inherent architectural fault that has presumably damned it to eventual condemnation, or as the narrator says, floating in air in the split-second between its life in suspension and death in collapse. Like in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025), where a ceiling hole acts as the film’s emotional motif, this house and its flaws represent the cracks in a family–with the house as a sort of adhesive–that constantly seem destined to fully break open.

Gustav, an acclaimed film director, had left his wife Sissel during the youth of his daughters’ lives. This is a common trait of Gustav; his attractive sentimentality tethers people to him, only to leave unannounced and without acknowledgement of their memories together. Gustav constantly tries to erase the past while living in the future that it built. Coming back to Oslo to reclaim the house after years of self-isolation, he is perplexed that Nora, an acclaimed theater actress, refuses to star in his newest film. Nora had seen how when Gustav featured her sister Agnes in a starring role in one of his early films, it instilled a resentful loyalty in Agnes. So much so to the extent that arguments between Nora and Gustav are often decided by Agnes as a swing-vote for either side. Gustav does eventually find his replacement for Nora in star American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), before realizing that he cannot use artificial methods–another malleable actress and another film–to cover up his memories in the same way the house is in an ever-changing state of renovation to hide its inevitable confrontation with time.

Each of the family trio’s lives seem to be propelling forward at an accelerated rate, destined to collide, but the film never naturally provides the opportunity for it to occur. In one scene, Nora flees the mansion upon seeing Gustav bringing Kemp to it to practice for his new movie that will be shot there. In another, Kemp drops out of the same film after realizing her presence is surrogacy for the absence of the creative and loving relationship that Gustav wants with Nora. But these are all fragmented moments that seem to play out without imminent effect on each other, where the film instead insists they are all connected, even if in some metaphysical way. That being said, the surreality of Trier’s prior effort, Worst Person in the World (2021) feels lost at a Netflix mention or a TikTok reference during Gustav’s press run for his new film, exemplifying how Sentimental Value is stuck between an awkward middle-ground of original fiction in its own cinematic world and a fiction in the viewers’ world. The latter is less exciting, as more and more films (e.g. Knives Out 3 (2025) and Jay Kelly (2025)) refuse abstraction in exchange for something more tangibly palatable.

Sentimental Value feels like a structurally broken film with beautiful individual frames that fail to illustrate a cohesive picture. As the character vignettes accumulate, nothing truly crescendos to a point of climactic release; the narrative circumvents true confrontation where momentous events are implicit to a fault. The cheap glue between its starring trio makes supporting characters like Kemp and Agnes’s son Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven) feel like logistical inclusions to give meaning to what is confusingly unspoken. It is undebatable that the film is technically brilliant, with cinematography choices that treat the audience like a wandering eye, inappropriately intruding on moments of individual intimacy between the characters, but I just find myself wondering why the film shows us what it refuses to show its characters who need to see it more than we do.

Rating: SOFT 6/10

Letterboxd: https://boxd.it/37N23