On Inheritance, Obsession, and the Ethics of Art
There is a distinction, rarely articulated but immediately felt, between films that use art as a subject and films that interrogate it. The first category is comfortable, even celebratory: art as redemption, as self-discovery, as the thing that finally allows its makers to speak the truth they couldn’t find in ordinary life. The second category is harder to watch and more difficult to describe. Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s most formally and emotionally ambitious film since Oslo, August 31st, belongs unambiguously to the second. It looks at artistic practice from close range and finds there, alongside genuine beauty, something that is not entirely kind: a hunger that consumes its surroundings, a compulsion dressed in the language of meaning, a way of loving that requires the people you love to become, periodically, material.
The film’s central figure is Gustav, a Norwegian filmmaker of some late eminence, played by Stellan Skarsgård with an intelligence that refuses to make him either sympathetic or simply contemptible. Gustav is the kind of man who believes, with perfect sincerity, that his art communicates more honestly than his person can — and who is, in this belief, both entirely correct and completely wrong. He has made films about grief, about mothers, about the layered texture of memory in old houses, and he has made them with evident care. He has also been, by almost any ordinary measure, a failure as a father. His daughters grew up understanding that there were things the camera found more interesting than them, and they have built their adult lives partly around this knowledge, carrying it the way you carry something you cannot set down but have learned to stop noticing.
The film does not treat this as a simple failing. Trier is too honest a filmmaker for that kind of clarity. What he shows instead is a psychology in which art and avoidance have become so thoroughly intertwined that neither Gustav nor anyone around him can fully separate them. He returns, in the new screenplay he is developing, to the central trauma of his childhood: the day his mother died, and the moments immediately before it that he did not, as a boy, understand well enough to interrupt. A door opened; a look passed between them; he went back outside. The door closed. What he has been doing with his camera, for decades, is trying to open that door again and this time see what was on the other side. This is not cynicism; it is, in its way, a profound and even touching project. It is also a project that has required, repeatedly, that the people closest to him submit to its needs.
Renate Reinsve, returning to Trier’s work after The Worst Person in the World, plays Nora — Gustav’s daughter, a stage actress of considerable talent who has not spoken to her father in years. Reinsve has a quality that is genuinely rare: the ability to register inner weather without performing it, so that we sense what is happening in her before we can name it. Nora’s particular weather, as the film opens, is complex. She has made a life in theater partly because it offers the same thing her father’s cinema offered him — a structural reason to feel things intensely without having to own them outside the performance. Her resistance to Gustav’s screenplay, when it comes, is not really anger, or not only anger. It is recognition. She sees in the script not an artistic vision but a mirror, and what she sees reflected there frightens her more than any specific memory the film might disturb.
The film’s third major figure is Agnes, the family historian — played by Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in a performance that accumulates its weight so quietly that you may not notice until late in the film how much she is carrying. Agnes is not an artist. She works with the past in a different register entirely: she catalogs, preserves, arranges. She does not transform her family’s history into something that can be shown; she simply tries to ensure that it is not lost. Trier treats this difference with great seriousness. The film is quietly interested in the ethics of how we handle other people’s pain — whether we reproduce it, as Gustav does, rendering it into form and releasing it into the world as art; or whether we hold it, as Agnes does, keeping it present without converting it into anything. Neither approach is offered as obviously correct. But the film’s sympathies, at certain moments, are legible. There is something Agnes does that Gustav cannot, which is to be with the grief without making use of it.
The house in which much of the film is set functions as its central formal argument. Trier and his cinematographer shoot the old manor as a space in which time is not linear but accumulated — a location in which the Nazi occupation of Norway, a mother’s suicide, two daughters’ childhoods, and the current drama of a difficult collaboration all coexist as layers rather than a sequence. The camera moves through corridors with the particular attention of someone who suspects the walls are listening. Doors open and close with a persistence that is formally deliberate: no character ever fully inhabits any room, and none ever leaves entirely. The house is what the film believes memory to be — not an archive but a haunting, not information but presence, not something you access but something that remains in the space whether you acknowledge it or not.
This is, for Trier, a kind of emotional argument that has been building across his career. His earliest features — Reprise, Oslo, August 31st — were occupied with rupture and its immediate aftermath, with the quality of disintegration in real time. The Worst Person in the World moved to a gentler register, tracking the way feeling persists in the absence of the relationship that generated it. Sentimental Value extends this inquiry further, into the question of what we do with what we’ve inherited: not just trauma in the psychological sense but the entire apparatus of sensitivity, perception, and compulsion that seems, in this film’s world, to travel through families like a frequency.
The film’s most formally complex sequence involves a film within the film — Gustav directing a scene that reconstructs the day of his mother’s death, with Nora playing the mother. The conceit is on the surface familiar: art as the site where the unspeakable is approached obliquely, where the past is reconstructed in the safety of the fictive. But Trier does something unexpected with it. In Gustav’s version, the death does not happen. The woman survives. Not because she suddenly has a reason to, not because the son says the right thing, but simply because the scene cuts before the worst of it arrives. This is not presented as healing or resolution. It is presented as the specific power and the specific limitation of cinema: the ability to stay the hand of what already happened, to introduce a conditional — what if — into the irrevocable. The camera can hold open the door that closed. It cannot change what was waiting on the other side.
The film ends on a silence that is, in its own way, as precise as anything Trier has directed. Gustav and Nora look at each other after the cut is called. We have been in his films long enough to understand that this moment will not be resolved in the conventional sense — that no declaration will come, no catharsis seal the emotion into a complete shape. What we get instead is the thing Trier’s cinema has always argued for: two people, unable to fully understand each other, nonetheless sharing a frame. This is, in the film’s visual and moral logic, as much as can be hoped for. Not comprehension. Not forgiveness. Not even, quite, peace. But the experience of attending to the same moment at the same time — which is, the film suggests with great gentleness, what we ask of art, and what art, at its best, occasionally provides.
— Critical Echoes
Expanding the discourse: Further reflections on contemporary cinema