Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi) is a film about family, filmmaking, and a house, not necessarily in that order. It is a beautiful, moving work of simultaneous depth and simplicity, honing in on various tensions both large and small that define our relationships with our loved ones. It tackles parental and sibling relationships with a modesty of intent that gives it an unassuming directness and power. Most effectively, the film captures the immensity of the passage of time, which is here embodied in the family's house, which is red-painted and distinctly Victorian with its gables and steeples and stands tall and proud in the heart of Oslo, bearing witness to everything that has happened in four generations of the Borg family.

The current patriarch of the family in question is Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), a celebrated writer/director who was a mostly absent father to his daughters, Agnes and Nora. He had a fraught relationship with their mother, a psychoanalyst, that eventually ended in divorce, all of which was witnessed by the house, where Agnes and Nora grew up and with which they are saddled as adults when their mother passes away. The sisters have settled into distinctly different adult lives: Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) has married and settled down as a wife and mother, while Nora (Renate Reinsve) is an theatre actor whose life is unmoored, unstable, and fraught with restlessness (when we first meet her, she is having a panic attack before going onstage to play the lead role). After their mother's death, they are given the responsibility of emptying out and potentially selling the family house, which was originally built by Gustav's grandparents.

Those plans are put on hold with the reemergence of Gustav, whose hasn't made a film in over a decade, but is the subject of a major retrospective in Oslo that he hopes will reignite his career. Stellan Skarsgård has a world-weary demeanor that is at constantly battle with his character's desire to remain relevant and important, monikers he has chased his entire life at the expense of his relationship with his family. His flawed dream is to finally merge the two: He has written a script, loosely based on the life of his own mother (who committed suicide), and he wants to shoot it in the family home with Nora playing the lead role, an offer at which she balks for a complex set of reasons. Gustav then turns to Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), a famous American star who is in Europe promoting her latest film. Rachel is eager to work with Gustav, but we sense from the get-go that she is all wrong for the part; Fanning plays her as a kind of innocent who is easily manipulated and misled, despite all her fame and fortune, but only because she has a good heart (it is testament to Trier's optimism that he sees a Hollywood movie star as being so genuine). That makes her quite the opposite of Nora; Renate Reinsve, who won an acting prize at Cannes for Trier's previous films, The Worst Person in the World (Verdens verste menneske, 2021), has an innate sense of how to convey Nora's constant flow of inner turmoil, which at times bursts out onto the surface. The tension between her and Gustav is palpable and sad, which we sense particularly through Agnes, who is constantly caught in the middle.

For the most part, Trier, who co-wrote the screenplay with his regular collaborator Eskil Vogt, wants to see the best in his characters as they struggle through their various flaws and shortcomings, which gives the film a deep, rich vein of humanity. Sentimental Value has been rightfully compared to a lot of Ingmar Bergman's family dramas, but Trier has a gentler disposition than Bergman. One of his greatest traits as an artist is his ability to balance the harsher realities of life with a perspective that leaves you with a sense of hope, which is precisely what Sentimental Value does (it is telling that we learn early in the film that the house has a "flaw" in the foundation that causes a crack up the walls, yet it never collapses). The title plays on our tendency to dismiss those things whose value lies primarily in how they feel to us—the sentiment they embody, which is always suspect in a transactional world. But, Trier shows how emotional attachment is a genuine value in and of itself, and he embodies it quite beautifully in the film's final shot, which Gustav actually describes in detail earlier in the film, but only takes on its full meaning when we see it unfold, with the eventual revelation of its artifice only confirming the truth of its emotional core.

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