Sentimental Value

The Ghost in the Screenplay

For years, Joachim Trier has been the cinematic poet of Oslo’s restless youth, chronicling the existential drift of twenty-somethings who feel everything and nothing all at once. But in *Sentimental Value* (2025), the director trades the open streets of the capital for the claustrophobic interior of an ancestral home, and the result is a film that feels less like a breeze and more like a haunting. This is not merely a drama about a dysfunctional family; it is a forensic examination of the violence inherent in turning one’s life into art.

At the center of this storm is Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a fading auteur whose ego is as bruised as it is large. Skarsgård plays him not as a villain, but as a man who has confused directing with parenting, mistakenly believing that if he can just frame the shot correctly, he can fix the past. His plan to film a comeback movie about his own mother’s suicide—and to cast his estranged daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve) in the lead—is the ultimate act of artistic narcissism. It is autofiction weaponized against the living.

Trier’s visual language here is more stifling than in *The Worst Person in the World*, yet infinitely more textured. He and cinematographer Kasper Tuxen turn the family’s multi-generational Oslo home into a sentient participant in the drama. The camera glides through hallways that seem to hold their breath, observing the "crack in the foundation" that serves as the film’s central, perhaps slightly heavy-handed, metaphor. But Trier earns the melodrama by grounding it in tactile reality: the dust on a forgotten script, the quality of light in a room where a marriage died.

The film’s brilliance lies in its casting gambit. When Nora refuses the role, Gustav replaces her with Rachel (Elle Fanning), a bright-eyed Hollywood starlet. Fanning is a revelation here, playing the "intruder" not with malice, but with a desperate, terrifying eagerness to please. Watching Rachel dye her hair and adopt Nora’s mannerisms is one of the year’s most uncomfortable cinematic experiences. It highlights the uncanny valley of performance: Rachel is becoming Nora, but she lacks the "sentimental value"—the accumulated grief—that gives Nora’s silence its weight.

Renate Reinsve, returning as Trier’s muse, delivers a performance of jagged edges. Unlike the charmingly messy Julie of her breakout role, Nora is hardened, her body language a series of defensive postures. The scenes between her and Fanning are electric, a duel between the person who lived the trauma and the person who is merely trying to memorize its lines.

Ultimately, *Sentimental Value* asks a question that few filmmakers dare to answer honestly: Can art actually heal? Gustav believes the camera is a tool for reconciliation. Nora knows it is a tool for exploitation. The film’s devastating conclusion suggests that while cinema can preserve the dead, it cannot save the living. Trier has made a film that is skeptical of its own medium, a mature, aching masterpiece that admits the screenplay can never quite capture the ghost.