When the competition is blood-spattered zombie flicks and high-stakes sports heists, it's hard to draw audiences to quiet family dramas that explore suicide, mental illness, parent-child abandonment, and other unpleasantness. It's even harder now that studios are increasingly worried about their bottom lines, streamers demand simpler scripts, and directors need big-name stars to get anything greenlit.

Danish-Norwegian director Joachim Trier knows these truths as well as anyone, and folds them carefully into his best movie yet. In Sentimental Value, an indie darling worries about his legacy after a film-festival retrospective; a smaller, regional star is replaced by an international actress to secure funding; a producer promises that Netflix will allow a theatrical release, pooh-poohing direct-to-streaming fears of the crew. Many of these inside-Hollywood concerns are played for laughs, while in between them all, Trier and his phenomenal cast illustrate a much more universal and unflinching portrait of the pridefulness, secrecy, and generational trauma that face families everywhere.

The film opens with a beautiful reflection on the Borgs' house in Oslo. It's been in their family for decades, and has seen its fair share of marriages, divorces, births, and deaths. As a result, family members' relationships with it are complex and individual. For filmmaker father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), who divorced his wife and left his daughters in the home, it holds painful memories of his own mother's suicide by hanging in the sunroom, as well as the dampened shame of leaving his family there. For younger daughter Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), its rich history no doubt played a role in her decision to become an academic historian. And for older adughter Nora (Renate Reinsve), who spied on her mother's therapy sessions through the walls and remembers her parents' vitriolic fights in their bedroom, it evokes the childhood that she's tried to forget as an adult and semi-successful stage actress. 

So when Agnes and Nora's mother dies and the house falls back into estranged Gustav's possession, the family is uncomfortably reconvened to figure out what to do with it. That task is complicated further when Gustav pitches Nora on his latest script, with a starring role he says was written solely for her and promises will shore up both their legacies. With their rocky relationship and his contempt for her work in theatre, she immediately refuses. But she's caught off-guard when news comes out that American it-girl Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) is attached to the project. Gustav's choice to film on-location in the Borg home, and the clashing of his creative and fatherly shortcomings with the three women's expectations, will be just another difficult installment to all the house has seen. 

For many of the film's most important themes — and it wrestles with a lot — the house is a poignant framing device. One powerful thread through Sentimental Value, for instance, is our tendency to keep things to ourselves that are scary or unflattering, and especially hide them from parents and children. The house, unable to speak but empowered through an omniscient narrator, keeps its own secrets, like the brief romance of a closeted gay aunt or the raucous parties of kids whose parents were out of town. When it's refurbished towards the end of the movie, we're left to wonder how many of those secrets will die with the new upholstery and shingling — just as the mother of Nora and Agnes, a lifelong therapist, took countless patient stories with her when she passed. In the same vein, the passage of time is a chief concern to both the house and its inhabitants; cracks in the walls that have spread over time mirror Gustav's discomfort at the visible aging of his longtime collaborators, and his unspoken hope that he has time left.

Beyond the house, and for other statements Trier wants to make with Sentimental Value, he couldn't have chosen a better four lead actors. As Gustav, Skarsgård is surly and barely self-aware, yet the in-world movies he's directed garner bonafide emotional responses from audiences and acclaim from critics. When Nora describes him as a "deeply flawed individual, but a great director," we see how the interpersonal wake he's left behind is matched only by his stature as an artist, and wonder how the two coexist. For her part, Reinsve plays Nora as her father's daughter; personally tormented, including by corrosive stage fright, but unquestionably talented in her artistic pursuits. She has a lot of gripes from growing up fatherless, but Gustav's absence can only explain so many of her ample shortcomings, and where the real culpability lies remains an uncomfortably open question. Part of that uncertainty comes from Lilleaas, whose character Agnes has somehow survived their shared childhood unscathed, both painting a beautiful picture of sisterhood and sacrifice while also putting her foot on the scale of nature versus nurture. (Overshadowed by bigger personalities, Agnes is maybe the hardest role, and the way she quietly reflects her older sister's fears about distant men and memories of tormented youth is a testament to Lilleaas' skill.) And rounding out the four, Fanning as Rachel brings an American naïveté to the fraught Scandinavian dynamics, as well as forcing us to think about how artistic representation fails when actors stand in for real-life counterparts. (In this way, Trier's script harkened back to 2023's excellent May December.) 

Trier swings for the fences with all these thematic threads and, especially with a polarizing finale, doesn't quite tie all of them together. But thanks to the quietly monumental efforts of his cast, the gentle 35mm cinematography from Kasper Tuxen, and a few jokes thrown in about the state of cinema, Sentimental Value will hopefully go home with more than a couple Oscars come March.