Name: Sentimental Value
Director: Joachim Trier
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Released: 2025
Duration: 133 min

Sentimental Value (2025) · Cinespective

Meaning, unpacked

Central idea

The film is about whether art can do the work of love, and what it costs the people turned into material. It can be read as an argument between telling a story and living with it, with the family house as the place where that argument plays out.

What it means, and why it matteredA father writes a script about his family's pain, then asks his daughter Nora to star in it. She says no. A Hollywood actor steps in, and the film he makes becomes a second stage for everything the family never said. The film asks whether art can do the work of love, and what it costs the people who get turned into material. You can read it as an argument between telling a story and living with it.

What it means

A father writes a script about his family's pain, then asks his daughter Nora to star in it. She says no. A Hollywood actor steps in, and the film he makes becomes a second stage for everything the family never said. The film asks whether art can do the work of love, and what it costs the people who get turned into material. You can read it as an argument between telling a story and living with it.

The title, Affeksjonsverdi, is a Norwegian insurance term for the value an object holds for its owner beyond its market price. Joachim Trier applies it to the family house in Oslo and to a whole family history. Nobody fully states what the house holds; the rooms, the objects and the light do it for them. The hinge is Gustav offering Nora the role. He reaches his daughter through work, too late and clumsily, and the film never lets him off easily, yet never condemns him either. It treats the attempt itself as meaningful. A story can't promise to heal anyone, but the wish to make one can still be a way of reaching for somebody.

Why it mattered

Sentimental Value belongs to the Scandinavian tradition of chamber family drama, running from Bergman to the present. What it shows is how that tradition now works through international co-production and a global film industry. It is a late entry, and a modern endpoint for the European family drama.

Its craft is quiet but deliberate. Trier lets performances breathe, with pauses and half-finished sentences, so much of the feeling comes from what characters hold back. Comedy and grief share the same scenes, and awkward social moments are not relief from the hurt but how the hurt shows itself. The house is shot almost like a character, with framing that links one room to the next. Hania Rani's spare, piano-led score supports the mood without telling you how to react. The film-within-a-film, co-written with Eskil Vogt, makes personal and professional conflict mirror each other.

After watching