By Jason Osiason

For anyone who has lived through family trauma this one will wreck you. Sentimental Value is the kind of film that moves through you slowly and leaves something behind. It masterfully fuses memory and cinema as a father’s last attempt to reach his estranged daughters. The experience feels like secret eavesdropping, like you are watching a family unravel in real time and recognizing your own reflection in the cracks.

The story follows Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, a once celebrated filmmaker returning to Oslo after years away. His career was built on art, but it cost him his family. When his former wife dies, Gustav comes back to the home where his daughters grew up, hoping to make a film about the past as a way to make peace with it. He brings a script based on their lives and offers his daughter Nora the lead role. She refuses. Hurt, he casts a young American actress named Rachel, which only deepens the wounds already running through the family.

Renate Reinsve, who I loved in The Worst Person in the World, is astonishing here as Nora. She gives the performance of someone who has been carrying anger for so long that it has become a part of her body. Every look and silence feels alive. Her pain and love for her father coexist in every frame. Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas plays Agnes, the younger sister who stayed behind, whose quiet strength and fatigue say more than words ever could. Together they form a triangle of love, guilt, and longing that feels unbearably real.

Having just visited Oslo myself, the city’s light and air feel even more vivid in the film. Trier captures it not as a postcard but as a memory, with streets that hold warmth and melancholy at the same time. The family home becomes a living archive. The rooms breathe with old arguments and lost laughter. You can almost smell the coffee still sitting cold on the counter.

Skarsgard is breathtaking. His Gustav is a man stripped bare, trying to use art as apology. You can feel the history in every glance, every pause before he speaks. He is vulnerable in a way that feels almost uncomfortable to witness. It is the kind of performance that reaches into your chest and stays there long after the credits roll.

Trier tells the story with the patience of someone who has lived it. Scenes linger on faces instead of resolutions. There are no grand speeches or perfect reconciliations, only small acts of grace and truth. A door left open. A hand that almost reaches. The sound of wind moving through an empty house.

By the end Sentimental Value leaves you silent. It asks what it means to forgive someone who never really knew how to love you, and whether art can ever make up for absence. It is tender, bruised, and full of truth. Watching it, I felt something close to home like an ache, a flicker of hope, and the strange comfort of knowing that even the most broken bonds still hum with life. [A-]