CIFF 2025 – Sentimental Value
One of the very best films that I’ve seen this year at the 61st Chicago International Film Festival (CIFF) is “Sentimental Value”, which is the eagerly anticipated film from Danish-Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier, the first since his award-winning “The Worst Person in the World” capped off his Oslo trilogy in 2022. It premiered this past May at the Cannes Film Festival, where Neon acquired North American distribution rights, with release dates expected next month. With his new dramedy, Trier once again gives us relatable, flawed characters dealing with past trauma in their own ways, which means some of them are not dealing with it at all, or very well. Yet we can only prolong addressing what the past has done to us for so long before we’re able to move forward.
Set in modern-day Oslo, “Sentimental Value” tells a layered familial story revolving around two estranged sisters, an absent father, and the Victorian house they all lived in. The thirtysomething sisters are Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) and her younger sibling Nora Borg Petterson (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who are recently brought together after the death of their mother, Sissel. Nora is single and a vulnerable stage actress who struggles with stage fright, as we see in the spectacularly funny opening sequence. She’s the one living in the old house. Agnes is a historian married to Even (Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud), with whom she has a young son, Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven), who’s about to turn 9. Their lives offer a stark contrast, creating a rift between the siblings, with Agnes often the responsible, practical one.
Their father, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), re-enters their lives at their mother’s memorial at the old house, bringing the two siblings together. He’s a filmmaker pushing seventy, hoping to direct an autobiographical screenplay he’s written, filmed, and backed by Netflix, to revive his artistic legacy. Seeing him walking within the rooms of the old house is as if both of them are haunted by the same ghost whose presence once tainted the walls of the house during their childhood. Gustav has been more in touch with Agnes over the years, who, at one time, worked as his research assistant and acted in one of his earlier films long ago, when she was a child. Gustav is hoping Nora will read the screenplay he wrote, since it’s for the lead role he has in mind for her. But reintegrating into his daughter’s lives after leaving their mother and abandoning them when they were young will be more of a challenge than he anticipated.
More tension develops when the two sisters learn that their old house will be handed over to Gustav, since it’s still in his name. All these years after he left to pursue filmmaking, he never signed the property over to their mother. Agnes calmly delivers this information to Nora, who is frustrated and stressed by the news. How can he come back into their lives and claim a place that is more theirs than his?
Trier incorporates the old house as a character at the onset of “Sentimental Value”, where we hear a female narrator poetically describe the house with nostalgic wonder and so many questions. Does the house prefer to be full or empty? How does it feel when something spills or crashes to the floor? When you live in a place for so long, do you take it for granted, or does your appreciation increase? (That last one is a question of my own.) Cinematographer Kasper Tuxen examines almost every square inch of the old house, in particular the crack that starts at the foundation and runs up to the ceiling of the top floor. It was there when the sisters were growing up in the house, and it was there when Gustav was a young lad as well.
What we learn of Gustav’s past comes to us in flickers, like memories. He grew up in the family house, and it became a place where an unforgettable trauma occurred related to his mother and the Nazi torture she endured during the war. Gustav had to process that as a young boy, and perhaps it’s been a process that he’s always pursued throughout his career. Trier co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt, and they wrote Gustav as something of a cad while also presenting moments when his own morality sober him. It offers Skarsgård, an actor many seem to take for granted, a chance to carefully and magnificently navigate the complexities of the character without delivering something expected. He is funny and sad, and someone who has subconsciously passed on his own pain to another generation.
When Nora refuses to take the lead role Gustav wrote for her, it’s understandable. From her perspective, there’s no way the two of them could work together. So, he casts popular American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning, striking in a challenging role), whom the director met at a retrospective screening of one of his past films, the one in which Agnes appeared. It seems to be a perfect match; she wants to get out of the YA genre she’s known for, and a “name actor” could certainly help Gustav’s film gain some traction. At the same time, seeing someone play a character written for her sends Nora into a tailspin, especially as Gustav gives Rachel the kind of care and consideration he never showed her as his daughter.
There’s honestly so much to parse from “Sentimental Value” as it touches on themes like mercy and forgiveness, that it’s a challenge to sit down and write about the viewing experience. I fell in love with the two sisters, mainly because Reinsve and Lilleaas are excellent here and offer such captivating, expressive performances. It’s likely I also felt this way because I used to have a sister, and seeing a complicated sibling relationship like this stirred something unexpected inside me. Much more can be said about Trier’s film, and I’ll definitely keep pondering it as I revisit it, but right now I’m confident it’s easily one of the best of the year.
RATING: ****
“Sentimental Value” (133 min.) opens in select theaters here in the States on November 14th.
