Review: Joachim Trier’s Most Emotionally Mature Film Yet

‘Sentimental Value’ is directed by the acclaimed Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier. Trier is best known for introspective and emotionally resonant films like Oslo, August 31st and The Worst Person in the World. The latter earned two Academy Award nominations, including Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay. With this latest feature, Trier seems to channel the emotional precision of Ingmar Bergman. This very well might be his most mature and accomplished film to date. ‘Sentimental Value’ screened in the main competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival. By the time this review gets posted, the winners will have been announced. If it were up to me, this film would win the Palme d’Or.

There’s a sense in this film that Trier has elevated his craft as a director. His work now reflects not only technical mastery but also a deeper philosophical engagement with his characters and their inner lives. Much like Bergman in films like Scenes from a Marriage, Trier employs a narrator who verbalises the inner states of his characters with startling clarity. Emotions aren’t simply identified. They’re evoked through vivid metaphors that draw us deeper into the character’s interior world.

In the opening scene, the narrator recalls how, as a child, the protagonist was asked to choose an object and describe how it felt. She chose her house. She describes how the house hated being empty. How it went through long periods of silence. It hated that feeling. This silence, of course, was due to the absence of a family member. The way the narrator describes the house's emotional state mirrors the void left behind by a family that was on the verge of collapse. When its rooms weren’t filled with footsteps or laughter, it felt empty, just like her. From that very first scene, you understand the emotional architecture of the entire family. The writing is devastating. It’s a great example of how good narration with vivid descriptive imagery can be a vessel for emotional truth.

Co-written with his longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt, the film explores how past wounds shape the present. It’s a deeply personal drama that reveals how the stories we tell can become a way of coping and understanding the pain we inherit. The story revolves around Nora Berg (Renate Reinsve), a stage actress grappling with the recent loss of her mother. Her estranged father, Gustav Berg played by Stellan Skarsgård in a powerhouse performance, resurfaces with an unexpected offer. He wants her to play the lead in his new comeback film. The project is clearly autobiographical. Nora refuses. She can’t seem to forgive her father for his past mistakes.

When she turns him down, Gustav casts a rising Hollywood star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), in her place. In this role, Fanning displays an impressive range of emotions. Of course, it is not long before she realises that she’s is portraying a version of Nora shaped by the director’s own memories. What follows is a delicate meditation on the fragile ways art can both reopen wounds and begin to mend them. ‘Sentimental Value’ is a film about the redemptive power of storytelling. It explores how the act of making cinema can be a form of healing. How re-enacting the traumas of the past can offer a new way of seeing, of understanding, of letting go. In revisiting pain through performance, characters don’t just relive their memories. They begin to reshape them. Trier suggests that we might not be able to escape our past. However, through the expression of art, we might just learn how to live with the pain.

‘Sentimental Value’ is filled with emotional honesty. It’s a reminder of why we turn to cinema in the first place. It's to make sense of the world. Great films help us understand why we feel the way we do. They offer a kind of clarity that life often withholds. In doing so, films like this one help us come to terms with the people we love. Not as we wish they were, but as they truly are, flawed and deeply complex. ‘Sentimental Value’ will almost certainly find itself in the awards conversation by year’s end. I loved everything about it.