Sentimental Value (2025). © Kasper Tuxen. Promotional image via Festival de Cannes.
Gustav Borg returns to his daughters with a screenplay. He has written a part for Nora, an actress, and wants her in the film that could revive his directing career. It is an offer she might consider very differently from another filmmaker. Coming from the father who left, it carries a family history that a script cannot clear away.
In Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value, Renate Reinsve plays Nora opposite Stellan Skarsgård as Gustav. Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas plays her sister Agnes, whose life and way of managing the family are different from Nora's. The sisters' closeness gives the reunion its stakes. Gustav is returning to a relationship between them that has continued, with its own habits and responsibilities, during his absence.
Nora refuses the role. Gustav then casts Rachel Kemp, an American star played by Elle Fanning, placing a newcomer inside material that is intensely personal to the family. A professional opportunity becomes awkwardly intimate. Rachel can approach the director with an enthusiasm Nora cannot share, while Nora has to watch someone else step into the part written for her.
The family house gives these encounters a setting that already belongs to everyone. In the film's official press notes, Trier recalled that a home passed down through his own family was for sale while he and co-writer Eskil Vogt were writing. He began thinking about what a child notices in a house, and what changes when that child becomes an adult looking back.
The film makes that perspective concrete through an essay Nora wrote at twelve, imagining the house observing the people who live there. Rooms can remain familiar while the people returning to them remember different versions of family life. That creates a problem for Gustav's screenplay: he has a story he wants to tell, but being its author does not make his memory the only one that counts.
Nora's refusal is a decision she can make clearly in a relationship full of things that are harder to articulate. Agnes also has a place in this history, beyond keeping everyone else's conversations possible. Watching the sisters together gives the film an intimacy Gustav cannot simply direct into existence. His offer asks Nora to trust him with a performance. The reunion asks what trusting him outside a film would require.
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