By: Dragan Vojvodić //

One of the most notable films of 2025, Sentimental Value by Joachim Trier, had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the Grand Prix, and later won the BAFTA for Best Film in a Foreign Language at the 79th edition of the awards. As of a few days ago, it is now showing in domestic cinemas. The film, which received prolonged standing ovations from audiences in Cannes, enters the upcoming Oscars with nine nominations, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress.

Joachim Trier’s new film was created following the international success of The Worst Person in the World, the final installment of his Oslo Trilogy (Reprise, 2006, and Oslo, August 31st, 2011). Sentimental Value explores family relationships after divorce, a father’s absence that more or less visibly marks his daughters’ lives, the confrontation with aging, trauma, and anxiety, the creative process behind an artwork, as well as the artist’s struggle with forces within and outside himself.

As in his previous films, Trier creates a melancholic atmosphere imbued with questions of love, memory, human striving, and identity—hallmarks of Scandinavian art. It is no coincidence that in 2018 he directed the documentary The Other Munch, on Karl Ove Knausgård’s curation of the Edvard Munch exhibition To the Woods – Knausgård on Munch, in which Trier and Knausgård, among other things, examine Scandinavian melancholy, one of Munch’s obsessive motifs.

At the heart of Sentimental Value is the relationship between an estranged father-director and his two adult daughters, whom he reunites with after years of emotional distance and unresolved trauma. Once-famous director Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, moves from Norway to Sweden after divorcing psychotherapist Sissel to focus on his film career. He cuts off contact with his daughter Nora, played by Renate Reinsve, now a successful stage actress suffering from anxiety attacks, and with Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who, as a child, appeared in one of his films.

After the death of his ex-wife, Gustav returns to the family home, itself a central “character” in the film. He brings with him a script he believes will mark his return to cinema and perhaps help him resolve his own trauma. He offers Nora the leading role of a mother who commits suicide in the final scene—mirroring the real-life fate of his own mother, a member of the Norwegian resistance tortured by the Nazis during the occupation, who took her life in that family home when Gustav was seven years old.

Nora, having not read the script, rejects it. By coincidence, the role goes to young American star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who fascinates the aging director at a film festival in France. Rejected by his abandoned daughter, Gustav is compelled, despite knowing that the presence of the young American actress in his future film is foreign and misplaced, to cast her in the lead role.

The film’s climax occurs when even Rachel realizes she does not belong in the film; the role she was meant to play fundamentally belongs to Gustav’s daughter Nora. After a cathartic conversation with her sister Agnes, in which it is revealed that Nora herself experienced a severe psychological crisis and a suicide attempt, the actress—having read the script—accepts the part. Although it is assumed that the father knew nothing of this, his script precisely “describes” Nora’s inner world and personal trauma.

At the conclusion of the final suicide scene, the psychological drama and the film-within-a-film resolve through a nonverbal understanding between the two main actors, father and abandoned daughter. What remains unresolved—and is not a flaw of the film—is whether Gustav Borg, through his attempt to make a “comeback film,” is seeking reconciliation with his own mistakes, to restore his lost relationship with his daughters, or simply instrumentalizing family life as artistic material to work through his life’s drama in his final cinematic work.

The film does not depict family wounds disappearing over time, but rather how they transform into repressed anger, guilt, or an unspoken need for closeness. At the same time, it explores the boundary between private pain and art: where honesty ends and the exploitation of others’ emotions begins.