Joachim Trier has already made one of the best films of the decade with The Worst Person in the World, which bowed at Cannes in 2021 and earned its lead star Renate Reinsve the Best Actress prize that year. Now, he returns to the Croisette with Reinsve for Sentimental Value, a devastating and hilarious movie about family, filmmaking, and the futility of holding onto hurt in the face of great loss. It’s also the best film of Cannes so far.

Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning, and Inga Ilbsdotter Lilleaas also star in the drama about a fractured family in the wake of a mother's death. Nora (Reinsve) and Agnes (Lilleaas) are grieving when their absentee father, Gustav (Skarsgård), comes back into their lives with a grand plan for reunification: he brings with him a script for a new feature, his first directorial effort in 15 years, and he wants Nora to take the starring role. Their family home is to serve as the setting of the film, but Nora immediately rejects this proposal.

Sentimental Value Is Absolutely Breathtaking

It Has A Lot To Say About Family, Relationships & Self-Mythologizing

Agnes, Nora, and Gustav all have their own healing to do, both from the wounds inflicted by Gustav’s leaving and from the various traumas ed down through the family, who have all lived in the same home at various times for decades. Gustav’s script appears to be about his mother, who committed suicide when he was a young boy, but it becomes clear that there’s much more to it than just a tool to work through grief. Gustav is reaching out to his daughters the only way he knows how - through his work.

Agnes is quicker to warm up to Gustav upon his return and their relationship seems more solid in general thanks, in part, to the fact that Agnes starred in one of his films when she was a young girl. Though she reflects positively on the experience, there’s the question of how ethical it is to cast your young child in your own film, one that comes to a head when Gustav wants to cast Agnes' young son in the movie, too.

Reinsve is doing terrifically subtle work here. Whereas her Worst Person in the World role practically required her to go big, Sentimental Value asks even more of the actor. Nora is a bundle of neuroses, so anxious to go on stage before the debut of a big show (not her first) that she asks her married lover (Anders Danielsen Lie) to slap her backstage and so depressed and angry that she avoids any interaction with Gustav that could trigger her to reflect on her complex feelings for her father and for being alive in general.

Skarsgård does brilliant work, too, capturing the pain of a father who is desperate to repair his relationship with his family but can only do so in a language they can’t quite understand, or at least aren’t ready to. Fanning gets a few of her own showcase moments as actress Rachel Kemp, who signs on for Gustav’s film after Nora turns it down. With Rachel's name attached to his film, Gustav's unnamed script becomes a big Netflix production, with a dubious theatrical release strategy and everything else that comes with that.

Sentimental Value feels like the film [Trier has] been building toward his entire career.

Sentimental Value’s satire of filmmaking is just as strong as its dramatic elements, providing some of the film’s biggest laughs. Cinema can be a vapid world and this film knows that, contrasting this idea nicely with the very real emotions underneath the surface. And there's so much lingering there.

Trier not only tells the story of the Borg family as they are in the present day. He uses the house they have lived in as a vehicle to look at all the ways in which this family has faced grave suffering and ecstatic love. The house is a living thing, a way to share secrets and joys and sorrows and so much more. It's a brilliant piece of design as well - the outside is painted a stark black with bright red trim, but the inside is basically an Ikea - all light wood and white furniture, but still somehow homey and lived in.

In a way, it's how Nora feels and acts in the form of a building and, just like the house, she carries the weight of all of these years within her. Raising her sister after her father left, listening in on her mother's patients through the walls, and finally, being a part of the film she denounced at the very start.

Trier captures so much while saying so little and, in many ways, Sentimental Value feels like the film he's been building toward his entire career. It's the first of the director's to be a sweeping portrait of a family rather than focusing so singularly on one person's experience. There's a history here that you can feel deep in your bones, the same way their house has so much feeling living in the pipes and floorboards and cracks in the foundation. That it reaches a place of emotion that is so breathtaking despite being clear from the beginning is a testament to Sentimental Value's raw power.

Sentimental Value premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.