The main character in Joachim Trier’s newest film, Sentimental Value, is a house. The stately home in the suburbs of Oslo has sheltered generations of the Borg family. As kids, Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve) and her younger sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), could hear their mother, Sissel’s therapy sessions with clients through the flue of a wood-burning stove in their bedroom. They could hear their parents’ conversations as well, both those mundane and tense. It’s the same home their father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), grew up in, too. He was born in the 1950s to a woman named Karin who was tortured by Nazis after joining the Resistance. She died by suicide when Gustav was a child, leaving the house to her childless, footloose sister, who then left it to Gustav when he was a young man. When Gustav divorced Sissel, he left them the house, though it remained in his legal possession after Sissel’s death. 

It’s in this house that we first meet Nora and Agnes, as they are hosting a party to honor the life of their deceased mother. The two are surprised when their father, many years estranged, shows up to the memorial. From that point on, the house becomes the film’s central focal point: a place where the primary drama transpires, a home base where three generations of a family gather, a film set, and, most importantly, a site whose evolving interior triggers formative memories for its inhabitants.

Sentimental Value, though a typical Trier film with its third-person narration, cast of frequent collaborators, and focus on Norway’s intellectual and creative class, is a sharp tonal departure from The World Person in the World (2023). In his last film, the protagonist, Julie (also Renate Reinsve), is constantly chasing the thrill of novelty: wildly different boyfriends who challenge her idea of family and politics, a new career that will help her finally reach an unknown potential, a different hairstyle to portray a new vision of herself to the world. Sentimental Value is a film distinctly rooted in the wounds of personal history, and is told in the same melancholy register as the first two entries in Trier’s “Oslo Trilogy,” Reprise (2006) and Oslo August 31st (2011). Both of those works focus on the psychic pain of a young Norwegian man—played in each by frequent Trier associate Anders Danielsen Lie—as he grapples with crippling depression and reflects on, and in some cases tries to re-create, a past time when he was happy. 

Though opening its aperture impressively to cover the emotional weight of an entire family rather than that of just one or two characters, Sentimental Value is told through a similar lens—of the unresolved past and its grip on the present. Trier, a third-generation filmmaker, has always fixated on his characters’ inability to move past their origins. While his prior films are sometimes exercises in nostalgia that can feel claustrophobic, focused on the perspectives of those who are mired by their darkened vision of the world, the feeling takes on a different sheen in his latest film. With Sentimental Value, Trier makes the case that nostalgia doesn’t have to drag one down but can actually propel one forward.

At the wake for his ex-wife, Gustav shows up unannounced, forcing his two daughters into the uncomfortable position of welcoming him after a period of estrangement. After they’ve settled into the reality of his arrival, he tells Nora he wants to talk, and the two of them meet up for coffee. Gustav, a director who hasn’t made a film in 15 years, tells Nora he’s written a script. It’s a story of a young, depressed mother—one who resembles his own—and he wants Nora, a successful theater actress, to be the star. The script, he says, was written for her, and she’s the only one who can take on the role. Besides, he wants to shoot the film at their family home and she should do something more personal than acting in “centuries-old plays.” Nora is first frustrated, then furious: Her father, who hates the theater, and has seen her only sporadically for most of her life, has barely ever seen her perform. Offended by what she sees as his arrogance, she pushes the script aside without reading it, declines the offer, and tells him that the film will never come to anything anyway. He’s washed up, she says—who would fund his fuddy-duddy movie?

The script, it turns out, is a stand-in for what neither of them is willing to discuss—that trauma has been passed down their family line like an heirloom, and acknowledging that, despite their discomfort doing so, might be worthwhile. And in the end, it is precisely the porous boundary between his art and his life that allows Gustav to make a meaningful film. Shortly after he and Nora talk, he briefly leaves Oslo for the Deauville Film Festival, where one of his old movies featuring Agnes is screened. It garners a new fan, a well-known American actress named Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning). Moved to tears by the film, Kemp signs up for the role that Nora declined and shows up at their family home in Oslo while the two sisters are sorting through their late mother’s belongings. 

It’s at the house during a walkthrough with Kemp that we first get a glimpse of Gustav’s script, which ends with the protagonist’s death in the home’s back room. It’s in this very room, Gustav tells her, that his own mother hanged herself when he was a child. Rachel is surprised and made only more discomfited by the director’s evasiveness about the story’s biographical details—he insists, “It’s not my mother in the script,” when it’s clearly a personal work. In the absence of Nora, Kemp becomes a female figure onto which Gustav can project all of his fixations: He even asks her to dye her blonde hair brunette, closer to Nora’s color. 

Kemp reacts to being used as a proxy by trying even harder to be something she’s not. She starts to put on a bad Norwegian accent, and meets with Nora to get advice on how to work with her father and access her character’s overwhelming sadness. When Gustav is unimpressed by Kemp’s table reading, he begins to needle Nora directly. Drunk, at a family gathering one night, he mocks her chosen career: He tells her she should make her own productions, because being only an actress makes a woman too desperate for attention. A few nights later, he gets drunk again and calls her to say they should talk more. “I’m sensitive and so are you,” he grumbles into his iPhone. 

Gustav is certainly an imperfect father: cavalier about his creative accomplishments, distant and then suddenly close and presumptuous about receiving closeness in return. Yet he understands his daughters’ emotions because they are so similar to his own. This is particularly true of Nora—for she understands, despite her misgivings, what art can give and take from its maker. She likes acting, she tells Agnes at one point, because posing as someone else is one of the only ways she can access her unconscious. Nora has also inherited her father’s aversion to intimacy; for the first half of the film, she has an affair with the costar of a play, choosing him because he is married and unavailable. Though Nora is afraid to admit it, she and her father are mirrors of each other. The question the film hangs on is whether she is willing to accept this unflattering kinship, and, in turn, find in their shared past the possibility of a future. 

While Sentimental Value’s narrative center is Gustav’s relationship with his eldest daughter, its other conflict involves the difficulty of making a film in the first place—and the nostalgia Gustav continues to feel for an industry that has passed him by. At each step of his new movie’s production, he runs into a snag that forces him to contemplate how cinema and his experience making it have changed since his last movie, over a decade ago. An auteur’s arrogance guides his belief that his film deserves to be made, but doubt and frustration sneak in—a sense that he might be becoming a relic of the past.