Film Review: Sentimental Value 情感的價值 (2025) - Norway
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 10/10
Rating: ★★★★★
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I left the theater after Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” feeling as though I’d been hollowed out and meticulously reassembled, piece by aching piece. This is not merely a film; it is an act of profound emotional archaeology, excavating the buried fault lines of family and the treacherous terrain where art meets life. Trier, already a master cartographer of the soul after “The Worst Person in the World”, has surpassed himself. This is a towering, soul-shattering masterpiece, the kind that arrives perhaps once or twice a decade and reminds us why cinema exists.
The storm rages within the worn walls of a Norwegian family home, a place thick with the dust of memory and the sharp scent of betrayal. At its eye is Nora Borg, played by Renate Reinsve with a performance that transcends acting and becomes pure, vibrating human exposure. Reinsve, reuniting with Trier, doesn’t just portray grief, pressure, and simmering rage; she seems to bleed them onto the screen. Her Nora is skinless, a raw nerve ending. Every glance, every slight from her father feels like a physical wound. We watch her navigate this emotional minefield not as observers, but as unwilling participants in her unraveling.
And what a father she must navigate. Stellan Skarsgård, as the once-celebrated, now flailing director Gustav Borg, delivers a performance of monstrous tenderness. Skarsgård is a revelation. His Gustav is a man who has spent so long viewing life through a viewfinder that his own children have become characters in his never-ending script. He is selfish, blind, manipulative, yet Skarsgård imbues him with a desperate, pitiable humanity. He needs this film, this comeback, even if it means cannibalizing his family’s pain. The decades of unspoken resentment crackling between Reinsve and Skarsgård is the film’s terrifying, electric core. You cannot look away.
Trier introduces a stroke of meta-genius with Elle Fanning’s Rachel Kemp, the luminous Hollywood starlet cast to play Nora in Gustav’s autobiographical film. Fanning is perfectly terrifying in her wide-eyed earnestness. As Rachel diligently "studies" Nora, trying to absorb her trauma for "authenticity," the film transforms into a haunted hall of mirrors. It forces us, and its characters, to confront the central, agonizing question: Can art ever truly honor the truth, or is exploitation its inevitable shadow? Fanning’s presence isn’t a gimmick; it’s the scalpel Trier uses to dissect the very act of storytelling.
The film’s technical mastery is inseparable from its emotional power. Kasper Tuxen’s cinematography is a character itself. He captures the stark beauty of the Norwegian landscape not as postcard scenery, but as a reflection of the characters' internal desolation. Inside the Borg house, the frame tightens, the light grows colder, shadows deepen. This home isn't just a setting; it’s a museum of unsaid things, a prison of "sentimental value" – the hollow comfort we find in objects when the people they connect us to are lost or unreachable.
Too often, films about filmmaking disappear up their own navels. “Sentimental Value” avoids this trap utterly. It is relentlessly, ruthlessly focused on the human cost of creation, the collateral damage inflicted by the artistic ego. It’s about the ghosts we inherit – the legacies of parents – and the ghosts we create in our own wake.
Trier offers no easy outs. There is no grand reconciliation, no neat bow of forgiveness tied by the final reel. What he offers instead is infinitely more valuable and devastating: a moment of pure, unadorned, shattering cinematic truth. It’s the kind of moment that lingers long after the credits roll, a bruise on the heart and a testament to the power of the medium.
“Sentimental Value” is not just the best film of 2025. It is a landmark, a definitive masterpiece of this decade. It is cinema as catharsis, as confrontation, and ultimately, as a mirror held up to the messy, beautiful, cruel business of being human and trying to make sense of it all, frame by painful frame. Art doesn't heal here. It picks at scabs. And Trier, the surgeon, shows us the raw flesh beneath. See it. Feel it. Be changed by it. (Neo, 2026)
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