It may come as an unexpected revelation to learn that among this year’s most talked‑about contenders in the international awards circuit is a film originating not from Hollywood or Paris, but from Norway—a country more readily associated with fjords and understated dramas than with the glitz of red carpets. Yet, this recognition is not without precedent. In 2022, Joachim Trier, the celebrated Norwegian filmmaker known for blending psychological nuance with formal experimentation, captivated global audiences with his eloquent and subtly perspective‑shifting romantic drama *The Worst Person in the World*. That film earned the rare distinction of receiving Academy Award nominations for both Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay, securing Trier’s reputation as a director of deep emotional intelligence and stylistic daring.
His latest project, *Sentimental Value*, continues in this vein while expanding his cinematic canvas. The film, already crowned with the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and adorned with a constellation of European honors, has been widely regarded as a formidable Oscar hopeful. True to Trier’s established themes, it plunges unflinchingly into the labyrinth of familial bonds, unresolved grief, and creative self‑reflection. At its center stands Gustav Borg, portrayed with weary brilliance by Stellan Skarsgård—a once‑negligent father and filmmaker who returns from professional exile carrying the burden of an ambitious new screenplay. The work he brings with him is profoundly personal: an autobiographical script about his own mother’s tragic suicide. In an act of fraught emotional layering, Gustav envisions his estranged daughter Nora, played by Trier’s frequent muse Renate Reinsve, in the leading role. Yet her resentment toward her father’s years of absence complicates matters, and she ultimately declines his offer—a rejection that reverberates through the narrative as both an act of defiance and an expression of pain.
While *Sentimental Value* operates on the surface as an intimate study of fractured relationships, Trier insists that his visual approach—his use of place, light, and atmosphere—carries equal narrative weight. The principal setting, a house that feels almost sentient, functions as a surrogate character within the film’s emotional ecosystem. “It’s as though you can sense its presence, almost smell the rooms and feel the textures of the walls. That, to me, is the essence of cinema,” Trier reflects. Longtime admirers will recognize the location as a subtle echo of a pivotal home featured in *Oslo, August 31st*, the second entry in Trier’s revered “Oslo Trilogy.” This continuity of space serves not merely as nostalgic recall but as a meditation on memory—how environments bear the spectral imprints of the lives once contained within them.
In a conversation with *The Verge*, Trier elaborated on his creative process, describing his artistic framework as “polyphonic”—a term borrowed from music to indicate a narrative composed of multiple emotional voices, each distinct yet harmoniously integrated. This approach, he explains, allows the film’s story to unfold not through relentless plot propulsion but through the rhythmic interplay of silence, ellipsis, and emotional resonance. The director also discusses his attentiveness to performance, describing how he can often sense the depth of an actor’s interior world within moments of observation. “A good actor,” he notes, “draws the viewer into curiosity—the mystery of thought and emotion beneath the surface. Filmmaking, like acting itself, is always a dance between what is shown and what remains unseen.”
Trier’s process is marked by openness rather than rigidity. Though he begins with meticulously structured scripts, he encourages improvisation during rehearsals, enabling actors to shape the dialogue through lived experience. When unexpected qualities emerge—such as discovering quieter emotional gravitas in a character originally written as jovial—Trier adapts the material to embrace that authenticity. This insistence on receptivity extends to his favored medium: celluloid film. While shooting on 35mm imposes financial and logistical constraints absent from digital production, Trier defends the tactile warmth and luminous depth it lends to his images. It is, he asserts, a commitment to the sensory essence of cinema—the delicate play of light across skin, the shifting hues inside a familiar room, the flicker that reminds audiences of the physicality of seeing.
Throughout *Sentimental Value*, the director employs deliberate fade‑outs and narrative pauses to punctuate the film’s emotional rhythm. Rather than relying on overt chapter breaks as in *The Worst Person in the World*, these visual intervals invite reflection and temporal disorientation, compelling the viewer to reorient themselves emotionally with each return. For Trier, this editing strategy corresponds to the organic flow of music: the alternation between movement and stillness, tension and release. The film’s early sequences present fragmented glimpses of familial chaos—arguments, awkward reunions, moments of creative frustration—which gradually coalesce into a cohesive emotional symphony by the conclusion.
What most distinguishes Trier’s cinematic voice, however, is his capacity to locate grandeur within quietude. Even in its moments of strain and unspoken anguish, *Sentimental Value* resists melodrama. The tension accumulates in subtler registers: a pause at the dinner table, a withheld confession, the fragile rhythm of silence between sisters. “Life’s greatest dramas,” the filmmaker reflects, “often occur in those hushed spaces where words fail.” In conversation, he demonstrates an almost philosophical fascination with cinema’s ability to grant audiences permission to look deeply at one another—to fix their gaze on another’s face, to linger in emotional proximity that reality would not allow. In his estimation, this is the rare and radical empathy that film affords: the chance to study another human being—every nuance of expression, every trace of joy, confusion, or sorrow—with an intimacy reserved otherwise for love or madness.
Now playing in theaters, *Sentimental Value* stands as both a continuation and an expansion of Joachim Trier’s artistic universe. It captures the pulse of everyday human contradictions with exquisite restraint, reaffirming his place among contemporary auteurs capable of marrying emotional truth with aesthetic precision. To watch his work is to witness the unfolding of cinema as a language of empathy—at once delicate, unpredictable, and profoundly human.
Sourse: https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/830079/sentimental-value-joachim-trier-interview
