Grief is a family heirloom.
SENTIMENTAL VALUE is a film that sneaks up on you — not with plot twists or grand revelations, but with emotional pressure that builds so quietly you don’t realize how deep it’s gone until something breaks. Joachim Trier isn’t interested in dramatic reconciliations or cinematic absolution. He’s interested in the mess people leave behind, and the awkward, imperfect ways they try to account for it years later.
At its core, this is a film about family damage that never quite healed properly. A father who chose art over presence. Two daughters who grew up learning how to live around that absence in different ways. Trier frames this not as a battle of villains and victims, but as a study in emotional inheritance — how neglect echoes forward, reshaping adulthood in ways that feel personal but were never chosen.
Renate Reinsve’s Nora is restless, sharp, emotionally overclocked — a woman whose intelligence and capability never quite settle into peace. She carries a constant internal static, bracing for disappointment before it arrives. But Nora is not meant to be read alone. She only becomes whole in the presence of her sister, Agnes. Without Agnes, Nora’s volatility risks misinterpretation. With her, it becomes legible.
Agnes is the film’s quiet stabilizer — not because she is unhurt, but because she has learned how to hold hurt without letting it fracture her daily life. She is steady, maternal, observant, deeply feeling in ways that don’t demand attention. Where Nora externalizes damage, Agnes absorbs it. Where Nora moves, Agnes roots. Trier gives Agnes no grand speeches, but her presence reframes every interaction. She is the witness to Nora’s interior life — the person who remembers what came before the fractures.
Their relationship is one of the film’s great emotional truths. They don’t fix each other. They don’t resolve the past. But they recognize it in each other, and that recognition becomes a kind of wholeness. The film understands that siblings often carry complementary forms of the same wound — one loud, one quiet — and that survival sometimes means splitting the weight between two bodies.
Stellan Skarsgård’s father figure is quietly infuriating in the most realistic way. He isn’t cruel or monstrous. He’s worse: emotionally evasive, charming, convinced that meaning can always be retroactively applied. His belief that art might repair what he failed to tend as a parent feels painfully familiar — the idea that expression can substitute for accountability. Trier never lets him off the hook, but he also refuses the comfort of villainy. This is a man whose sincerity caused harm anyway.
What elevates Sentimental Value is its refusal to offer emotional shortcuts. Conversations stall. Reconnection attempts misfire. Apologies feel incomplete. Trier understands that reckoning rarely arrives as catharsis — it arrives as discomfort, as something unfinished that must still be acknowledged.
Visually, the film is precise and unshowy. Oslo feels lived-in, not curated. Interiors carry memory weight — rooms that remember more than the people inside them want to. Trier lets space do the work, trusting silence and proximity over explanation.
By the final movement, the film reveals its quiet thesis: healing is not repair. It is recognition. Not forgiveness, but clarity. Nora does not become “better.” Agnes does not become “stronger.” They simply remain — together — carrying the truth of what shaped them without pretending it didn’t.
SENTIMENTAL VALUE is about what we inherit emotionally, how siblings divide that inheritance to survive, and how adulthood becomes the long aftermath of conversations that never happened. It’s quiet, piercing, and deeply humane — a film that understands wholeness doesn’t come from being unbroken, but from being seen.
