Everyone involved in Sentimental Value knew it would all come down to the final shot.
Joachim Trier‘s follow-up to his Oscar-nominated The Worst Person in the World (2021) was always going to be a delicate balancing act: An attempt to make a Terms of Endearment–style melodrama without treacle or schmaltz.
Sentimental Value stars Worst Person breakout Renate Reinsve as Nora, a celebrated but troubled theater actress, and Stellan Skarsgård as her estranged father, Gustav Borg, a once-great filmmaker. Nora has barely spoken to her father — aside from a few drunken late-night phone calls — since he left her, her mother, and her younger sister Anges (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) after the divorce.
Her mother’s death brings Gustav back. Still listed on the deed to the family home — in his family since 1918 — he returns to handle the sale. He’s also got reconciliation on his mind. It’s been 15 years since Borg’s last film, but he’s written a new script inspired by his mother’s suicide in that same house. He wants Nora to play the lead. (It would also help with financing; she’s a star in Norway.) Nora refuses to read it.
Gustav goes to the Deauville Film Festival, where they are screening one of his early works: A WWII drama starring a young Anges. In the audience, American movie star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) is so moved she asks to meet him. They strike up a friendship, and Gustav offers her the role he wrote for his daughter — coaching Kemp to mimic Nora’s gestures and even dye her hair.
The stage is set for a Bergman-esque family drama about identity, legacy, and how art becomes a way to speak the things we can’t.
Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning in ‘Sentimental Value’
Courtesy of Neon
“The idea of the father in this story was that kind of director who can see something very lucid and clear in his art, but, in real life, is a bit of an avoiding asshole,” says Trier. “I found that interesting.”
“It’s something very common among directors,” adds Skarsgård. “They can be fantastic at explaining the psychology of a person you’re playing and hopeless when it comes to their own life.”
Sentimental Value unfolds largely inside the Borg family home, a storybook villa layered with a century of memories.
“The trigger for the story was when my mother put my grandparents’ house up for sale,” says Trier. “I realized all of the 20th century had happened in that house. My grandfather was a resistance fighter who was tortured and barely survived, then became a filmmaker, and even went to Cannes in 1960. I think filmmaking was his way of coping with that trauma. It got me and [co-screenwriter] Eskil Vogt thinking about broader things, like how the war affected my family. Does it take three generations to get rid of that?”
Finding the right house wasn’t easy. “There aren’t many villas like this in Oslo,” says producer Andrea Berentsen Ottmar. “Usually, the ones that look this beautiful outside are totally refurbished inside and not that soulful.”
After months of scouting, Trier remembered the house he’d used for the final scene of Oslo, August 31st (2011). “We contacted the owner again, and it turned out to be exactly what Joachim envisioned,” says Ottmar. By chance, the owners were leaving on a six-month vacation, and the production could move in.
The real interiors served for the modern-day scenes, but for flashbacks — spanning 1918 to the 1990s — the team rebuilt the first and second floors at full scale in a studio.
It was Trier’s first time shooting period scenes — all his earlier films are contemporary — and he wanted to avoid “making a chamber drama where everything feels stagey and stiff.”
Renate Reinsve and director Joachim Trier
Christian-Belgaux
“We talked a lot about Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread and The Master as examples of beautiful period work,” says production designer Jørgen Stangebye Larsen. “We wanted an authentic, lived-in feeling, not some kind of romantic period piece.”
Larsen researched the house’s real history — “there are actually several photos in Norway’s national archives, which was handy,” he notes — and drew on his own family records. “My grandfather took 5,000 color photographs with his Leica camera from the ’40s through the ’90s.” Larsen combed through them for furniture, art, and wallpaper references.
Trier and cinematographer Kasper Tuxen set out to trace that history cinematically.
“We had this idea of Gustav, the film-director father, and this house, spanning 100 years, which isn’t far from the history of cinema itself,” says Tuxen. “So we matched the lenses and film stocks to the aesthetic of each era.”
Early black-and-white scenes were shot on hand-cranked 16 mm for a jittery 1920s feel. Later decades evolved from 16 to 35 mm, their grit and grain replaced by the smoother spherical Super Baltars of the 1970s — the lenses Gordon Willis used on The Godfather — and finally by Zeiss Super Speeds reflecting the 1980s and ’90s look. The only era skipped was ’50s Technicolor: “It would’ve taken us too far out of reality,” says Tuxen.
For Gustav Borg’s fictional war film — the sequence screened at Deauville — they went all in, applying a bleach-bypass process for a desaturated, silver-rich look recalling both Saving Private Ryan and the Tarkovsky films (Stalker, Andrei Rublev) that inspired it.
In the studio, Larsen built the house’s history layer by layer, uncovering a vintage wallpaper pattern hidden beneath paint in a nearby home and having it reprinted using original methods. He had the wooden columns in Borg’s front room hand-carved, sourced authentic pieces from museums and galleries, and planted a full garden behind the house to provide the backdrop view out the window.
“The idea was to give period authenticity but also to show how a house changes over time, how pieces get adapted and reused,” he says. As the story moves into the present, bespoke pieces and hand-painted wallpaper give way to “chill IKEA furniture.”
To replicate the views out the window throughout the years, Larsen went high-tech, creating a 3D model of the property with VFX tools “usually used for sci-fi films.” “We scanned the exterior, checked archives for how the neighborhood looked through the years — buildings, cars, trees, even flowers,” he says. “You can actually watch the trees grow and the shade change through the decades.”
A 3D model of the exterior of the property was created with VFX tools to mimic the change in nature throughout the decades.
Neon
“We had mobile LED screens on cranes set up behind the windows, which we built to match the original house,” says production designer Jørgen Stangebye Larsen.
Neon
“You can actually watch the trees grow and the shade change through the decades.”
Neon
Tuxen estimates that about 60 percent of the film was shot handheld. “When we get into close-up, I’ve got the camera on my shoulder and I’m right in there. It’s my favorite thing to do.” But there are also dolly and tracking shots and a series of static frames that shift the view from subjective to objective.
“I come from a restless skater identity,” says Trier. “I was a champion skateboarder for several years, holding cameras while moving since I was a kid. I adore that. But not for random purposes. I also love old-school rigs and rails, using that classic film language.”
For Skarsgård, the material hit close to home. A father of eight (with six actors, including Alexander and Bill Skarsgård), he recognizes Gustav’s conflict between artistic drive and parental failure. “He needs his job, and I need mine,” he says. “I can’t live without the danger, the excitement, the communal experience of creating things — and that often collides with family life.”
There were other parallels. Gustav suffers from heart problems; Skarsgård, who had a stroke three years ago, now uses an earpiece on set. “Someone reads my lines to me while the other actor is speaking,” he says. “It’s hard to concentrate — harder than learning the lines ever was.”
Still, he insists he’s a far more present father than Gustav. “Since 1989, when I left the Royal Dramatic Theatre, I’ve been filming four months a year and changing diapers for eight,” he says. “My son Gustaf saw the film and asked, ‘Do you recognize yourself?’ I said, absolutely not. In some ways I’m a good parent, in others a bad one — but we’ve all survived and stayed friends.”
Stellan Skarsgard and Renate Reinsve in ‘Sentimental Value’
Kasper Tuxen/Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection
Dysfunctional families and the collision of art and life run through Trier’s work, but Sentimental Value is his most emotionally direct film yet. There’s little in the way of stylistic tricks or cinematic razzmatazz to match Worst Person’s psychedelic “mushrooms” moment or the famous time-freeze sequence when Reinsve runs through the streets of Oslo.
“I grew up in the ’90s, I come from irony,” says Trier. “But this time I wanted intimacy and tenderness. I’ve had two kids since the last movie, and I keep asking: What do I pass on to them, and what was passed on to me? That matters to me now. My line is: Tenderness is the new punk.”
Trier and Vogt knew they were on a knife-edge. “We were opening the faucet a bit,” says Vogt. “It’s easy to manipulate emotions; it’s easy to make people cry. That’s not a measure of quality. The title Sentimental Value was our way of admitting it. These emotions have value only if they come from an honest place.”
“I love melodrama,” adds Skarsgård. “It’s a beautiful form. But when it’s done badly, it’s disgusting. It’s heavy syrup.”
To cut the sweetness, Trier and Vogt mixed in what Trier calls “a bit of lemon.” The soundtrack swings from Terry Callier’s melancholic soul (“Dancing Girl,” “What Color Is Love”) to ’80s synthpop: Roxy Music’s “Same Old Scene,” New Order’s “World (The Price of Love).” “We’d joke that a record collection is like rings in a tree trunk,” says editor Olivier Bugge Coutté. “You can tell the good years and the bad. Gustav’s good years were the ’80s.”
Amid the melodrama, Trier inserts flashes of comedy. One sequence sees Nora, seized by stage fright, bolt across the theater like a startled deer. Another, after Netflix joins Gustav’s film for financing, spoofs the junket circus: Gustav erupts mid-interview, calling a reporter a “TikTok troll.” “Those five-minute junket interviews — nothing good ever comes from them,” Skarsgård laughs.
Elle Fanning, as Hollywood star Rachel Kemp, takes a selfie with Anges (Lilleaas)
Kasper-Tuxen-Andersen
The film’s emotional hinge arrives in two mirrored script-reading scenes. First, Rachel Kemp (Fanning) performs the role written for Nora, desperate to impress Gustav.
“Gustav has awakened something in her, something that surprises her, this authentic emotion,” says Fanning, “but at the same time she’s almost pushing that emotion out because she’s excited by it and wants Gustav to see her talent.”
The result is moving, but just a little hammy. Realizing it’s not hers, Rachel withdraws from the project, telling Gustav what he already knows: That he wrote the role for Nora and she’s the only one who can play her. The scene, with Fanning playing real Rachel, not acting Rachel, is open and raw.
“I remember driving to set that morning, almost in tears, not quite knowing why,” Fanning recalls. “It was something personal, and Joachim sensed it. He came to my trailer, guided me through that scene with such care, and somehow awakened something in me I hadn’t felt in a long time. He’s always right there beside the camera — not in a tent — whispering to you to take the risk. The cinematographer is on a little stool with wheels, moving with you, capturing those moments. And the lighting is done 360 so you can move freely and catch those feelings in real time.”
Later, Anges brings the Norwegian script to her sister and asks her to read it. Nora resists, then breaks open mid-scene.
“I did that scene after Elle’s version,” recalls Reinsve. “Her character is trying to make the director proud. Mine doesn’t want to read it at all. Nora’s emotionally flat until everything she’s been holding down rises to the surface. It was a really risky scene to play. I had no idea if anything would come.”
The next scene goes further. Nora, lying in bed, speaks to Anges about their childhood, her depression, and the different paths their lives have taken.
“Everyone was so focused,” recalls Lilleaas. “There was this awareness — like before you shoot a nude scene, that same intimacy and respect.”
When Nora asks, “How did it happen? You turned out fine, and I became fucked up?” Anges was supposed to stay on the floor. “I cracked completely open,” Lilleaas says. “Then I heard Joachim whisper, ‘Get up on the bed and hug her.’”
“She crawled up and hugged me, and Kasper jumped on the bed with the camera,” says Reinsve. “Then she says, ‘I love you.’ That wasn’t scripted. Joachim and Eskil would never dare write that. It had to come from somewhere real.”
“When we finished, Joachim was crying, Kasper was crying, everyone was crying,” says Lilleaas. “The sound guy came in and told us that when we were hugging, our heartbeats synchronized.”
The sisterly embrace between Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas was not scripted.
Kasper-Tuxen-Andersen
It’s the film’s emotional high point — Sentimental Value at its most, well, sentimental — but it’s not the end.
The final scene unfolds on the set of Gustav’s new film. Nora has agreed to act for her father, playing a role he wrote that mirrors both his mother’s struggles with depression and her own.
“I told Joachim when I read the script it was dangerous stuff,” says Skarsgård. “There’s a final glance between Gustav and Nora. I told Joachim that it could be a trap. If you do it wrong, it becomes sappy.”
“We were both scared of the last scene,” agrees Reinsve. “They finally see something in each other. There’s so much grief in that, but so much hope at the same time. The look had to hold everything.”
Trier and Tuxen planned the camera move a year before shooting — a slow pullback from Gustav behind his monitor to a wide frame, leaving father and daughter small and separate. “Stellan was worried I’d have them hug,” says Trier. “But that was never the point. The moment I knew I had a film was when I imagined that ending. Reconciliation in a relationship that fraught is just baby steps, maybe even just acceptance of what will never be.”
In the finished shot, Nora completes the take and looks toward her father. Their eyes meet. A brief, bittersweet exchange — not forgiveness, but the beginning of it. They don’t touch. They don’t speak. Tuxen’s camera drifts back, holding them in silence, framed by the distance between them. Fade to black.
“There’s no happy ending,” says Skarsgård. “Closure doesn’t exist. There’s always scar tissue, always pain. But in that single gaze, there’s hope. It’s the beginning of maybe forgiveness.”
“They deeply love each other, but maybe this is the best they can do — make a film together,” adds Trier. “Maybe that’s enough.”
