Sentimental Value - Review
- Jack Aling
- Oct 12, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 18
It's So Hard to Love Someone Who's So Filled With Rage.
Review written by Jack Aling
Sentimental Value is directed by Joachim Trier and written by Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt.
After the death of their mother, sisters Nora and Agnes are reunited with their estranged father Gustav, a once-renowned film director who offers stage actress Nora a role in his comeback film. Won the Grand Prix at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.
You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family. Each and every family is different and complex. Traits and habits are passed down through generations, for better or for worse.
The Worst Person in the World stands all as one of my all-time favourites, so expectations were high going into Joachim Trier's latest - Sentimental Value. When an estranged father returns into his now adult children's lives, fuelled by a new creative drive, trauma buried in the past comes back to the surface, where what was once left unsaid becomes an unavoidable truth.
Sentimental Value is beautifully layered with so many characters and perspectives to unpack. Paired with multifaceted performances from sisters Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as well as their father Stellan Skarsgård - the ways their differing relationships shape and evolve feel so intimate and natural.
Fixing the mistakes of the past can often be an impossible task. As much as some of us would like it to be, life is not a movie that you can create, direct and recast in your image. Joachim Trier uses his latest project within a project to explore family relationships to a touching and devastating effect.
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