VIFF 2025 | Holding Onto 'Sentimental Value' – Norwegian Blues

"Why didn't our childhood ruin you?"

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2025—The Worst Person in the World duo of Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier and his actress Renate Reinsve reteam for their searing generational family drama, Sentimental Value (aka Affeksjonsverdi). Set around an Oslo family home, Trier employs the processes of acting, performance, and directing as therapy for a fractured absentee father/daughter relationship.

A prickly Stellan Skarsgård co-stars as Reinsve and the magnetic Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas' esteemed but estranged Swedish filmmaker father, Gustav, back in town after their mother passes away. Along the way, he pitches a semi-autobiographical film loosely based on his family's WWII generational family trauma and his later adult life, subsequent divorce from their mother, and eventual estrangement, to star Elle Fanning's American movie star character after Reinsve's stage actress Nora turns down the role out of principle.

Fanning's impressive presence as the flighty celebrity turned serious actress over the course of preparing for a role clearly modelled on Gustav's own mother, while personified through Nora's physical resemblance, adds gentle humour and compassion to the film's trickier familial relationships. In a small role, TWPITW actor Anders Danielsen Lie returns to the fold in a knowing romantic presence echoing the growth and evolution from the trio's previous triumphant cinematic collaboration.

Neon / Elevation Pictures

It's not clear how or where the detailed elements of this fictional family came from (Trier comes from a long line of filmmakers himself), but they feel so authentic and lived-in. Each central character gets their own personal history and layered motivations as to why and how they coped with an absent presence in their lives. Every frame of Sentimental Value offers such rich drama and comedy for the actors to express. Everything about it, from its melancholic subject matter around despair, suicide, torture, post-war trauma, and parental baggage, feels effortlessly fleshed out through the complementary but dynamic performances.

Trier's exceptional film is so confidently and poignantly poetic as a devastating but moving portrait of a family's origins and dysfunction seen through long-held paternal issues of emotional avoidance. Reinsve, Lilleaas, and Skarsgård are magnificent as sisters, daughters, and their "centre of the universe" father. Sentimental Value's structure as a sprawling film-within-a-film with theatrical stage play elements of mercy mirroring the family's past, present, and future is sublimely realized.

Sentimental Value screened at the 2025 Vancouver International Film Festival as part of the Special Presentations series at the Vancouver Playhouse.


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