TIFF Review: “Sentimental Value”

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier, 2025) 4½ out of 5 stars

Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World) won the Grand Prix (or second-place award) at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his latest, Sentimental Value, which just had its Canadian premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Starring his frequent muse, Renate Reinsve (the aforementioned Worst Person plus Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man), Stellan Skarsgård (I’ll Find You), and Elle Fanning (A Complete Unknown), along with a luminous Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (A Beautiful Life), the movie explores fraught family dynamics, memory, and love in an exhilarating drama that provokes almost as much laughter as deeply cathartic tears. It’s a celebration of life in all its uncomfortable and joyful complexity.

Thrillers come in all shapes and sizes; Sentimental Value is of the emotional-rollercoaster variety, as spirited in its highs and lows as the best action films. The goosebumps start right away, in a post-prologue scene set in Oslo’s National Theatre, where Reinsve’s Nora, an actress, experiences the worst kind of stage fright, almost ruining her opening night. From then on, the movie takes viewers on a journey where difficult questions are raised, with meaningful answers left for us to decipher.

Nora is the daughter of Gustav Borg (Skarsgård), a world-renowned movie director who hasn’t made a feature film in 15 years. A largely absent father, he shows up at his ex-wife’s funeral, surprising both his daughters; Nora has a younger sister, Agnes (Lilleaas). He especially triggers Nora, all the more so when, the next day, he tries to give her the script for the much-anticipated new film of his, in which he hopes she will play the starring role. She refuses, angry that this is the only way he knows how to communicate.

Shortly thereafter, there is a retrospective of Gustav’s work at a French film festival, where a young American movie star, Rachel Kemp (Fanning) is deeply moved by one of the works screened there. She and Gustav strike up a conversation, discover a rapport, and before long she is on her way to Norway to take the part that Nora refused.

There’s a lot more to the plot than the above, but all of it centers on the trauma of things and events past. The physical repository of many of the family’s memories is the house in which Nora and Agnes grew up, which is also where Gustav (and the generations before him) spent their childhoods. In the aforementioned prologue, a narrator explains how, when young, Nora wrote an essay on what the world would look like from the perspective of the house. Was it happy with what happened within its walls? There was both good and bad.

As there is both good and bad in most people. The script weaves in and out of history, touching, among other details, on the torture Gustav’s mother suffered as a captured member of the Norwegian Resistance during World War II. There is also a lot of talk of suicide—attempted, realized, and fictionalized—so this is not a film for the faint of heart.

But it is beautiful, with terrific performances throughout. What is of sentimental value to one group of people may be immaterial to others. Trier examines the bond between the sisters, the different ways they react to their father, Gustav’s frailty and vulnerability beneath the arrogance, and many other topics universal to most families, if unique to this particular narrative. Like Nora’s acting at the National Theatre, Sentimental Value is frightening at times but always profound.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.