In this article, Khushi Jain explores memory, intergenerational trauma, and artistic transformation in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value.
There is a scene in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, somewhere around the forty-minute mark, featuring a dark red vase: Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) are packing away their childhood home after their mother’s death. The vase is one of several items being considered and bubble wrapped. After some playful banter, it is decided that it will go to Nora. The conversation shifts to the unexpected return of the sisters’ father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård). They hear the door of a car close, and the camera cuts to show Gustav and a few other people arriving at the house. Nora walks backwards, almost drops the vase and sprints out through the backdoor with the vase in her right hand.
There is nothing remotely profound about that decorative glass ornament. Even the film forgets about it. Yet, for whatever reason, Nora’s instinct is to take it with her when she runs from the house and, from her father. The vase is essentially a metaphor for the film, in which familial relationships and inter-generational trauma carry a similarly indescribable sentimental value. In some ways, Trier’s latest feature is a non-narrative prequel to his Oslo trilogy (Reprise (2006), Oslo, August 31st (2011), The Worst Person in the World (2021)), attempting to explain why his young protagonists are the way they are. The film is about Nora, a theatre actress, her sister Agnes, an academic researcher, and their father Gustav, a director in decline. Having left his daughters when they were girls, Gustav returns to Oslo with a script for Nora, and the family’s complicated history resurfaces, forcing both him and his daughters to confront their individual pasts.
Sentimental Value premiered in Cannes, where it also won the Grand Prix, and has appeared in a number of critics’ “best of 2025” lists. It is not hard to see why the film has and continues to receive accolades. Most obviously, it is the stellar performances of Reinsve, Lilleaas and Skarsgård that make it worthy. But perhaps it is also the narrative’s strikingly neat conclusion, which not only makes the film emotionally comfortable to watch but also creates psychological determinism.
Nora’s red vase, like all other elements of the film, only remains interesting as long as the film doesn’t end. Nothing about Sentimental Value lingers, a fact that is quite uncharacteristic of Trier’s storytelling. Reprise ends with Erik imagining a future for himself and his friend Philip, who was last seen being taken to a psychiatric hospital, and Oslo, August 31st, with Anders shooting up in his childhood bedroom. Even The Worst Person in the World, Trier’s safest film (until Sentimental Value) leaves you with feelings of melancholy. Sentimental Value only begins in a convoluted network of relationships – familial, ancestral, professional and romantic – and dilutes its intensity by ending them in apple-pie order.
Intergenerational trauma, on which the dramatic premise of Sentimental Value hinges, is totally accounted for. Trier is careful to ensure this and employs the Borg house as a voiceover narrator for this very purpose. The most obvious and most successful quest for answers is Agnes’ visit to the National Archives of Norway in search for her grandmother Karin’s confession of the torture she experienced under the Nazis. Karin was part of the Norwegian resistance movement and had killed herself in the Borg residence when Gustav was seven. Agnes’ research provides an explanation for Gustav’s behaviour, helping her and her sister understand why their father is the way he is. This tracing of the ‘why’ helps Nora and Agnes ultimately forgive Gustav. While this invokes sympathy for Gustav, it also leaves him (and arguably everyone else) free of any moral and/or social responsibility. And we find ourselves in a house where all questions can be answered and all actions be rationalised. It is a house belonging to characters and not people.
Gustav deals with his trauma by turning it into art: the script he brings to Nora. Everyone in the Borg family is an artist, just like most other protagonists of Trier’s films. Art is what redeems the Borg family, the film itself, and to an extent, even Trier. Laura Staab’s incisive reading of Trier’s gendered artists for Another Gaze draws attention to just how empty and skin-deep Julie – his first creative female protagonist (also played by Reinsve) – was in The Worst Person in the World. Sentimental Value’s Nora is certainly an enrichment in comparison, especially given the maturity with which the film allows her to have a social network and ruminates especially on her relationship with her sister. The film (which Trier co-wrote with long-time collaborator Eskil Vogt) also gives her profession ample space and import. Her association with the Chekhovian heroine Nina (from The Seagull) brings her character some respectful depth and she even plays the Western theatrical canon’s most iconic emotionally disturbed man, Hamlet.
After these plays, the two other pieces of art that appear in the film are Michael Haneke’s 2001 erotic psychological drama The Piano Teacher and Gaspar Noé’s 2002 art thriller Irréversible (do note that the sources for all creativity continue to be male, including Gustav). Both are DVDs that Gustav inappropriately gifts his 10-year-old grandson saying that the former will help him learn all that he needs to know about women and maternal relationships. Art is as expressive as it didactic for Gustav. Unbeknownst to him, his script, in recounting his mother’s death, also mirrors his daughter’s suicide attempt (which he never knew about). History repeats itself and art becomes a bridge across time and characters. Gustav’s vision for the project is so stubbornly specific, personal and reflected in his daughter that even Rachel Kemp, the actress hired in her stead (played by Elle Fanning), can see that the film was only written for Nora. For Nora and Agnes, forgiving their father takes the shape of accepting to act in his story (for Agnes it is letting her son be in the film).
In Sentimental Value unearthing the past explains the present and art helps one come to terms with it all. By the end, the narratorial and ancestral voice of the film, the Borg residence, is demolished and replaced by an impersonally modern and ahistorical house. At the same time, it is reconstructed on a sound stage as the set for Gustav’s film, and the histories of the three characters become its narrative mainframe. Everything is metamorphosed into art. It is worth noting though that Trier doesn’t leave us with an image of Nora as Gustav’s character but of Nora as an actress, that is, Nora as his character. She is as much a person as she can be allowed to be within the tidy folds of Trier’s film.
As the real becomes reel, life also imitates art. Characters with fully rounded but absolutely explicable personas pardon each other and move on. Gustav returns to filmmaking with the choice of his actors (his daughter and grandson) and even his cinematographer. Nora and Agnes forgive their father for his absence, lack of emotional intelligence and microaggressions. Art (especially in the form of Gustav’s film), as agreeable as its significance and ubiquity are, is still a deus ex machina. The absence of full-fledged confrontations is not easy to overlook either. The film has its moments: some small like Nora feeling overwhelmed in Agnes’ house, and Nora and Gustav silently smoking together in the garden, and, some big like Gustav and Rachel spending the night on the beach, and Nora and Agnes’ heartfelt, tear-stained conversation. But momentary is all it remains. It is not that Sentimental Value is a bad film but that I have come to expect more from Trier. It is a complete experience on its own (perhaps too complete) with the unfulfilled promise of seeping into the chambers of the heart. There is of course a certain sentimental value in that promise and in Trier’s characters, who offer the kind of clean, concrete answers and rock-solid reasons that most of us can only hope to find in our own lives and families. Nora’s red vase is still in there somewhere. But Trier has a need to explain its history and find a place for it, the consequence of which is that you don’t leave the cinema holding it in your right hand.
Released in cinemas 26th December 2025.
