Family — a word often wrapped in warmth and love — does not evoke the same feelings in everyone. For some, it is a source of pain, loss, and misunderstanding, coming not from strangers, but from the very people closest to them. Sentimental Value explores these quiet fractures within our most intimate relationships.
Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, which received one of the longest standing ovations at Cannes 2025, is a return to form for the director of The Worst Person in the World (2021), but also a quiet, breathtaking deepening of it. This is a film about memory, family, and storytelling.
At its heart is Nora, played by Renate Reinsve with such aching restraint. Nora is a stage actress in mourning — for her recently deceased mother, but also for the life she might have had with a father who never truly looked at her, never truly listened. That father is Gustav Borg, a once-celebrated film director played with heartbreaking contradiction by Stellan Skarsgård, who suddenly reappears in her life with an idea: he wants to make a movie about their family. And he wants her to play the lead.
But Nora says no. And so, he casts someone else — Elle Fanning as Rachel Kemp, a luminous young actress flown in to embody a woman she’s never met. As the shoot begins, Nora finds herself drawn back into the orbit of the man who once left her behind — not as his daughter, but now as a spectator to her own erasure.
And still, she watches.
Because Sentimental Value is about what we pass down through gestures, omissions, and yes, through art. There is something metafictional happening here that is as subtle as it is brilliant. Nora is an actress. So is Renate Reinsve. Gustav is a filmmaker, directing a version of his life. So is Joachim Trier. Fanning plays an actress playing a woman she never knew. Everyone is performing. Everyone is aware. The roles we play within families are often the hardest ones to leave.
Joachim Trier leans into that doubling. He uses filmmaking as confrontation. And Gustav, with his tender arrogance, speaks fluently in both languages he knows: cinema and family. But for him, art is a way to control the past. For Nora, it’s a wound — a reminder that he never truly saw her.
We also meet Agnes (played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), Nora’s sister, played with quiet empathy and groundedness. Agnes has a family of her own — a child, a stable home and family. Gustav asks if her child could appear in the film too — extending his reach into the next generation, blurring the boundary between lineage and narrative. What is legacy if not the attempt to write ourselves into what comes next? The house where the film is set — an old home in Oslo — becomes a kind of memory palace. Every room holds a version of someone who once walked through it.
And Nora? She stands at the center of this spiral, trying to hold her ground. A woman loved onstage, but terrified of stepping into the light. Her panic attacks, her stage fright — they are not performance problems. They are emotional truths catching in her throat. We learn of a relationship with a fellow actor Jacob (Anders Danielsen Lie) who “helped” her find calm before performances by hitting her. Renate Reinsve plays her not as someone still learning where her boundaries begin. Still learning to protect herself from the people she loves. Still searching for a way to speak, when everything she has to say has been scripted by someone else.
What makes Sentimental Value so piercing is its honesty — and how gently Trier allows that honesty to arrive. The film is full of pauses, half-glances, sentences that fall apart before they reach their end. Because sometimes a parent’s love, when translated through the wrong medium, becomes something else entirely. Sometimes it becomes a script. Sometimes a prison.
Sentimental Value is about what was never said. Naming what was taken and what was never offered. It’s also about asking: What do we owe our parents? What do they owe us? And when does telling your own story mean letting someone else’s version go?
And for many of us, that’s where healing begins.
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