Renate Reinsve delivers one of the year’s best performances in “Sentimental Value.” (Neon)
Danish-Norwegian director Joachim Trier makes films that are stunning in their complexity, their subtlety, and their depth. He wrestles with the mystery of what it is to be human, what it is to be alive, and finds great beauty to go along with an awful lot of heartache.
“Sentimental Value” (R, 134 minutes, in theaters), his follow up to 2021’s sublime “The Worst Person in the World,” involves a 70-year-old filmmaker, Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgard), who re-enters the lives of his two adult daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), after having abandoned them and their mother years earlier to pursue his career.
Considered long past his prime, Gustav hopes to revive his career by making a personal film that involves family history, including his mother’s suicide. He wants to shoot it in the family home where the sisters grew up.
Renate Reinsve, left, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas play sisters in Joachim Trier’s “Sentamental Value.” (Neon)
Though both hurt by the past, Nora, single and committed to her work as a stage actress, and Agnes, a historian with her own family, react differently to their father’s return. While Agnes tries to play peacemaker, Nora can barely contain her bitterness. When Gustav offers Nora his film’s lead role, suggesting it’s the part of a lifetime, she refuses to consider it. She won’t even look at the script.
Instead, Gustav turns to Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), a young Hollywood movie star looking for work that’s more artistic and challenging.
As work begins on Gustav’s film, memories, current family dynamics and the pursuit of art collide.
And it’s breathtaking to observe.
Trier, working with a script he wrote with longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt, creates characters whose thoughts and feelings are so tangled that you wonder if they, themselves, can sort them out. For all the pain their father has put them through, for all of their anger or frustration, Nora and Agnes still love him. And Gustav, who appears so self-serving in his interactions with his daughters, so focused on his art that his children seem an afterthought, might return that love, but not in a way readily apparent.
It’s all maddening, this struggle for them to connect. You know, like with real families. Real humans.
Reinsve, Skarsgard, Lilleaas and Fanning are all first-rate as characters struggling with their identities. All deserve any year-end awards they collect.
Reinsve, also the star of “Worst Person,” is especially remarkable. Between her work with Trier and her performances in last year’s “Armand” and “A Different Man,” she’s easily one of the most compelling actresses in film today.
And “Sentimental Value”? The best movie I’ve seen so far in 2025 – and the year’s almost over.
It opens Nov. 20 at Cape Cinema in Dennis.
** Click here for Tim Miller’s previous movie columns for Cape Cod Wave **
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Tim Miller, Movie Critic
Tim Miller is co-president of the Boston Society of Film Critics and a Tomatometer-approved critic. He teaches film and journalism at Cape Cod Community College in West Barnstable. You can contact Tim at [email protected] or follow him onTwitter @TimMillerCritic. Or you can ignore him completely.
