How do you follow a breakout hit? That question has been lingering in the air at the Cannes Film Festival this year. . The Norwegian director Joachim Trier has been coming to Cannes for the better part of a decade or more, but it wasn’t until 2021, when his romantic drama The Worst Person in the World premiered that he’d produced something that felt like a hit. That film, about a woman reaching her 30s and realizing she doesn’t have her shit together, went on to have a real life: It’s regularly cited in the Letterboxd four favorites of the perennially online. Audiences sobbed en masse at the idea of feeling seen, and it went on to become one of the most celebrated and fawned-over art house films of that year
His follow-up to that film, teased by Charli xcx at Coachella as the marker of our “Joachim Trier summer,” is Sentimental Value. It shares a lead star (the miraculous Renate Reinsve) and location (Oslo, mostly) with Worst Person, but casts a wider net on its subject matter, crafting a story about a lineage of people, rather than Trier’s typical sole protagonist.
The title is a reference to the emotionally rich, but monetarily worthless relics Nora (Reinsve) and her younger sister Agnes’s (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) mother leaves behind after she’s died. Things get complicated when, at her wake, the girls’ father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgard) walks through the door. A celebrated filmmaker, he’s barely spoken to Nora in the past decade. During that time, she’s become an acclaimed actress, and Gustav has a feeling that his latest, unwieldy, hard-to-finance project will only work if she decides to play the lead part.
Making it worse: He wants to shoot the film in the very house his children grew up in, one that had been passed down through several generations. A way to soak up its ghosts.
It quickly becomes clear that this meta take of artistic therapy isn’t the best way for Nora and Gustav to bury the hatchet. She rejects the script without reading it. Later, at a Deauville Film Festival retrospective of Gustav’s work, a hot-ticket American actor, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) is in the audience, moved to tears by one of his early works, calling it a masterpiece. Maybe, he thinks, Rachel will be the person to get this project moving. But in doing so, she becomes a conduit for Nora and, she soon realizes, a conduit for the film’s subject: Nora’s late grandmother, who took her own life before she was born.
In one twisted scene, Gustav guides Rachel through the house, talking her through the film’s proposed final scene, in which she waves her son off to school then hangs herself. “That’s the stool she used,” Gustav says to a shocked Rachel. Later, Agnes laughs off that faux revelation: It’s new from IKEA.
It’s a film about deception and performance—and how we can use these things to make and to mend. Nora and Gustav are similar in the sense that they both use their art as a way to process what they’ve been through, but there’s a cunningness to Gustav that sours their relationship. He wants to cast Agnes’ adolescent son in the film, much in the way he cast Agnes herself in one of his earlier features. (She’s since abandoned acting for academia.) Cinematic language is all he seems to speak.
After the film screened at Cannes, there were pools of people in tears outside the theater. If Worst Person was his big, accessible knockout, Sentimental Value feels like Trier is scratching at something even more specific and personal, digging a little deeper between the lines. With all of its big ideas of faith and reconciliation, art and the heart, the film still feels clean and perceptive. The malaise inside of each character feels universal, applicable to anyone just making it through life these days. Trier’s trick as a filmmaker is his understanding of how we handle it.