Tolstoy’s famous opening line from Anna Karenina about families sounds as if it could have been the jumping off point for Joachim Trier’s latest Oslo-set film, which is both a domestic melodrama and a slyly comic analysis of his chosen vocation. He quickly establishes what it is that makes the Borg family unhappy with a brief voiceover narrative about the provenance of the beautiful house built by an ancestor of the clan around the turn of the 20th century and what it witnessed starting around the time of the war, when Norway was occupied by the Nazis and the woman of the house—the mother of internationally admired film director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård)—was arrested and tortured by the Germans because they believed her work as a therapist undermined their authority. The main plot device of Trier’s film is Borg’s decision, at the age of 70, to make his first feature in 15 years based on a script inspired, but not necessarily “about,” his mother in the hopes that his estranged daughter, Nora (Renate Reinsve), a successful stage actor, will play the lead. She turns him down flat, because she still resents him for leaving her mother, another therapist who remained in the house after the divorce settlement and, as the film opens, has just died. 

Trier’s elegant script, developed with his usual writing partner, Eskil Vogt, is almost too thorough in its dissection of the Borg family and how its history has, again to paraphrase Tolstoy, damaged each member in its own way. Nora is introduced on the opening night of a play almost catatonic with stage fright, delaying her entrance interminably until she has to be pushed out in front of an audience that has become seriously concerned. In contrast, Nora’s sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who, though she once acted as a child in Gustav’s most beloved film (set during the war), has chosen not to go into the arts and instead is a historian, a convenient decision for the movie since it allows her access to records that explain her family’s background, which Trier can exploit when it suits his purposes. Agnes is contentedly married and has a small son, Erik (Oyvind Hesjedal Loven), who becomes one of the gravitational pulls, along with Nora, that draws Gustav back into the family orbit, and at first Agnes’s impulse to forgive him pits her emotionally against her sister, who still wants nothing to do with her old man. The audience has been prompted to take her side by Trier’s careful characterization of Gustav, which is that of an imperious blowhard who has been banking on his celebrity as a Bergmanesque artist for almost his entire career. He can be as rude and self-centered as he likes, so when he is feted at a French film festival and introduced to a young American movie star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who wants to do something serious, he offers her the part that Nora turned down. The collaboration tests not only the young American’s wherewithal as an artist, but also Gustav’s muddled intentions for the film and Nora’s misgivings about her position in a family whose history she has rejected out of unmediated enmity. The worst part is that Gustav is determined to make the film in the family home to which he still has title and where his own mother killed herself, a move that further divides the sisters, since they grew up there without him.

This being a Scandinavian film not directed by Ingmar Bergman, the melodrama is spiked with drily humorous touches that make it not only bearable but relatable in ways that seem universal. In perhaps the movie’s most famous scene, Gustav explains to Rachel about how his mother hanged herself “on that very stool right there,” shocking the young actress speechless. When he relates this story to Agnes afterwards, his daughter looks over at the stool and says, “You mean that one, the one from Ikea?” The scene establishes Gustav’s mischievous and self-serving capacity for cruelty in a compact way, much the same way that the scene in the National Theater conveyed Nora’s exquisitely self-defeating chronic anxiety. In the end, of course, Gustav’s movie turns out to be about Nora, not his mother, and Sentimental Value‘s almost hermetical perfection starts to feel stifling. Unhappy families are indeed unhappy in their own way, but never this immaculately. 

In Norwegian and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Sentimental Value home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Mer Film/Eye Eye Pictures/Lumen/MK Productions/Zentropa Entertainment S5 APS/Zentropa Sweden AV/ Komplizen Film/British Broadcasting Corporation/Arte France Cinema/Film I Vast/Oslo Film Fund/Mediefondet Zefyr/ZDF/Arte