Control · Fall 2026Page 79 of 100.THE REVIEW
Light from two tall windows falls into an empty stairwell with a curved iron railing.
Light falls through tall windows onto an empty stairwell. Joachim Trier treats the family house as a character that remembers what its occupants would rather not say.The photograph is by Taras Chuiko on Pexels.

Review

The house remembers what the family will not say.

Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value follows a vain film director and the two daughters he left, and it is the most grown-up family drama in years.

Written by CONTROL

This article runs 442 words and takes about two minutes to read.

8out of 10
Film
Sentimental Value
By
Joachim Trier
From
Neon, 2025

Every family has a house that holds more than it should. In Sentimental Value, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2025, it is a turreted wooden villa in Oslo’s Frogner district where the Borg family has lived for generations. When the mother dies, the father returns. Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, is a celebrated director who has not made a film in years and has barely spoken to his daughters in longer. He has a new script, it is set in the house, and he wants his elder daughter to star in it.

That daughter, Nora, is a stage actress played by Renate Reinsve, who worked with Trier on The Worst Person in the World. Nora is brilliant on stage and seized by fear before every performance, and she says no. Gustav, who has never taken no as information, casts an American star instead, played by Elle Fanning with a sweet, uncertain intelligence. The younger daughter, Agnes, a historian with a family of her own, becomes the film’s quiet conscience, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas gives the least showy and most moving performance in it.

A grand wooden staircase with an ornate railing rises through a faded, paneled hall.
A grand staircase rises through a faded, paneled hall. Sentimental Value follows a vain director and the two daughters he left, meeting again in rooms that hold their history.The photograph is by Lucas Craig on Pexels.

The director who cannot stop directing

Trier and his co-writer, Eskil Vogt, understand a particular kind of father, the kind who can express love only as material. Gustav’s film is about his own mother, and slowly it becomes clear that it is also about Nora, a story he can tell only through a script and a camera. Skarsgård is superb at the vanity and the tenderness at once. He never asks the audience to forgive Gustav, and the film is generous enough to let us decide.

Trier also has fun with the business. Gustav’s birthday gift to his nine-year-old grandson, two notoriously brutal art films on DVD, is one of the funniest moments of the year. The house is treated as a character, and its rooms shift across seasons and decades in a way that feels like memory rather than effect.

An old table lamp with a fabric shade stands on a dusty windowsill before a garden view.
An old lamp stands on a dusty sill before a tall window. Trier’s family drama is patient with its silences, and it is the most grown-up film of its kind in years.The photograph is by Sander on Pexels.

A little too tidy

The last act resolves more neatly than the rest of the film prepares us for, and one reconciliation arrives through a device that is clever where it might have been painful. The film went on to become the first Norwegian winner of the Academy Award for international feature, and it is easy to see why voters loved it. It is also easy to wish it had trusted its own mess a little longer.

The verdict: Watch it with a parent or a sibling, or pointedly without one. It is funny, humane and exact about the ways families use art to say what they cannot say to each other.