Why Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is the most acclaimed European film of the year

This may be the year of the abrasive Hollywood heroine. Think of Rose Byrne, who received an Oscar nod for her role as a nerve-frazzled mother in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, or Jennifer Lawrence, kicking up a storm at a family party as she becomes gripped by post-partum psychosis in Die My Love. Alongside them, there are the gun-toting female revolutionaries of One Battle After Another, led by the indefatigable Teyana Taylor. Then there are the women who form the heartbeat of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. The touching, Norway-made film has become one of the most beloved releases of the past year, ever since it premiered to a rapturous reception at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix, narrowly missing out on the Palme d’Or. Since then, Sentimental Value has enjoyed the highest opening-weekend per-screen average for a foreign-language film in the United States. Feted at the Golden Globes this January – where Stellan Skarsgard claimed the best supporting actor honour – it now has nine Oscar nominations, including best picture and best director. Not bad for “a small, weird country in the north”, as Trier puts it. Remarkably, all four leads are nominated for Academy Awards. They are led by Skarsgard, who plays Gustav, an ageing filmmaker with a waning career and a script – possibly his final feature – centred on his own mother, a wartime survivor. Renate Reinsve stars as Gustav’s daughter Nora, a renowned stage actress, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas plays her younger sister Agnes, reunited with their estranged father following the death of their mother, Gustav’s ex-wife. Then there is Elle Fanning as Rachel, an American actress whom Gustav courts to play the role after Nora turns him down. The film marks Trier’s reunion with Reinsve, following 2021’s The Worst Person in the World, in which she played the flighty Julie, another fabulously multidimensional and at points patience-testing heroine. Trier wrote Nora with Reinsve in mind. “I knew I wanted to work with her again, and I thought this character had a different type of – ‘depth’ is the wrong word, but [perhaps] ‘seriousness’,” he says. “It’s a more adult character. It’s not the young naïveté of The Worst Person … It’s someone who is actually grappling with a more severe sense of loneliness and depression.” By all accounts, it was an exhausting experience for Reinsve, compared to The Worst Person in the World or her screen debut in Trier’s 2011 psychological drama Oslo, August 31st. Those were “playful”, by comparison, she says. “We had music on set all the time, to have these parties and have all these fun, flirty moments, but here you had to tap into more of the emotional weight of the characters and the situation that the family were in,” she says. And she felt it, too. “It was sad leaving Julie, but with this one, [leaving] was a relief.” As movie critic Molly Haskell recently wrote in her review in the film magazine Sight and Sound: “Thanks to gender equity in the pain-in-the-ass department, women can now behave as badly as men, even worse!” Perhaps the women in Sentimental Value do not quite qualify when it comes to this label, but they are troubled, insular and introspective. “Nora is yearning to avoid herself, perhaps more,” Trier says, a nod to the melancholy she carries within. As she tells Jakob, the married man she is having a fling with, “I’m f****d up.” By how much? “Eighty per cent,” she estimates. There may be no better male screenwriters working right now than Trier and Eskil Vogt, his co-writer on all six of his features, when it comes to unpicking the female experience. They started Sentimental Value wanting to write about sisters, and the fragile bonds that bind. Only then did Gustav, “this complicated father”, begin to take shape, Trier says. “And then it snapped into place when he became a filmmaker, because we didn’t want to make him demonised. We wanted there to be a sense of understanding for him.” What emerges is a subtle exploration of blood ties and the very specific relationship a father has with his daughters. Or rather, does not. As Trier puts it, Sentimental Value deals with “repercussions of your chosen life, as opposed to your family life”. Gustav has spent his years focusing on his career, his film crew becoming his surrogate family. His real daughters are almost an afterthought, as he wallows in these fictional worlds. Trier makes no apologies for writing the character as a director, like himself. “It’s good to sometimes tell stories about things you know, and then use that to talk about family and communication,” he says. The movie references come thick and fast, whether it is Gustav being celebrated with a retrospective at the Deauville American Film Festival or his courting of Rachel, the A-list star with a string of blockbusters to her name. “Rachel is yearning to find herself more,” Trier says. “She’s become, I don’t know if the word is ‘commodified’, but it’s easy for a young star like Rachel to be commodified, to become a product … because you’ve got talent and you’re sweet, and I see a lot of people who peak early and have to go through that. “Like Taylor Swift – she only wants to sing her own songs, and that’s a healthy thing, I guess.” Fanning, who has been acting since she was three, knows a thing or two about this world. “With Rachel, she’s experiencing a little bump in the road in – not necessarily her career, but her relationship to acting in Hollywood and movies,” she says. “She is a giant movie star, and she’s recognised, but is she recognised for the things that she wants to necessarily be recognised for? “I think that’s with any job, but especially a creative job, because you also need time to grow. So you also need a little downtime to revitalise yourself and find something new.” The female trio of Sentimental Value are certainly drawn with more subtle variations than, say, Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths (2024), which saw Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s London mother lash out at anyone within range. Trier says the film is “more polyphonic than anything I’ve done”, as the many voices become one in a story that really is [about] the erosion of time. “People come and go, they’re born, they die,” he says. “How do we reconcile s*** before we’re not here any more? We have limited time with the people we love, and also with what we love.” Ultimately, Trier, now 51, holds a mirror up not just to these women or this family, but to himself. He may have a few more movies in the tank than Gustav, but nothing lasts forever. “A lot of my self-worth and my idea of myself comes from making movies,” Trier says. “I’ve shot films since I was a kid, actually. I made skateboard videos when I was younger. That was my life in film. I’ve always just filmed. I still do. So one day, maybe it’s over, and that’s a very sad thought, but something I will have to accept at some point.” Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook

Why Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is the most acclaimed European film of the year

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The Norwegian drama with Stellan Skarsgard and Elle Fanning won the Grand Prix at Cannes and has 9 Oscar nods. What makes it so appealing?

The Norwegian drama with Stellan Skarsgard and Elle Fanning won the Grand Prix at Cannes and has 9 Oscar nods. What makes it so appealing?