Sentimental Value

Like therapy, but Joachim Trier does it better than your therapist. I genuinely don't know what to say other than this movie had me feeling things I wasn't expecting… But in some ways, I kind of was. Stellan Skarsgård is just fucking incredible here. Like there were moments where he made me feel actual affection for a character I had every reason to resent and I honestly don't know how he does that. The way Gustav walks into every room like he still belongs there… the charm that clearly comes from the same place as all the damage. It never felt like a performance. It just felt like a person. Renate Reinsve is also really incredible in this… and I think the stage fright scene early on does more to tell you who Nora is than almost anything else in the movie. You can see everything she is carrying in that one scene without her saying a word about any of it. The way she holds it all inside while clearly being ready to explode is just something else entirely. Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas is probably the most understated performance in this whole movie, and I mean that as a real compliment. There are these parts where you can just tell that Agnes is protecting everyone, including herself, from things she hasn't fully worked through yet, and Lilleaas just plays that so naturally. The dynamic between the two sisters is the actual heart of this film, I think. And Elle Fanning… honestly, I went in not really sure what she was going to bring here because like if she was gonna speak Norwegian… I don't know if I could handle that, but luckily, she doesn't, and she just brings this genuinely warm and direct energy. And I cannot lie… but, Elle Fanning with brown hair took me a second to process. It looks good, just unexpected enough that my brain kept trying to adjust for the first few scenes. The cinematography in this is gorgeous… There is something about the way he shoots the family house specifically… like the house feels heavy in a way that is hard to describe but really easy to feel. Some of the early scenes in that house made me feel a kind of low-level dread without anything scary actually happening, and I think a lot of that is just how the light sits in those rooms… And then later in the film, the same spaces feel different because of how the characters are relating to them differently, and that is really cool to notice. And just as a side note… that might also be the most Norwegian-looking house I have ever seen in a movie. Like if you asked an AI to generate "A Classic Norwegian home in the woods," it would probably spit out that exact building… The score fits this movie so well. It never tries to do too much but it lands in exactly how it is supposed to. There is this one moment near the end where everything kind of quietly breaks open and the music makes it so much more affecting than it might have been otherwise… like it added this extra layer of sadness without pointing at the sadness directly which is really hard to do. I think what genuinely got to me most is that this is a movie about making something personal and how that process can be both the most honest thing you do and also the most selfish thing you do at the same time. Gustav is using everyone he loves to process everything he has never dealt with… And it isn't clean or easy… but in the end it does bring Gustav and the girls closer. I also think the whole Netflix angle inside the movie is quietly pretty funny. The movie doesn't go after it too hard but the way Gustav barely tolerates having to deal with the financing machine while just wanting to make his thing is exactly the kind of tension that makes the whole project feel real. A movie about a filmmaker fighting for his vision funded by the kind of people he is clearly fighting against… like that is sitting right there and Trier just lets it sit. I feel like I could keep writing about this for a really long time and still not quite explain why it worked as well as it did. There are movies that tell you something about people and then there are movies that tell you something about yourself while you are watching people on screen… and this is definitely the second kind. It went places I was not expecting and it did it quietly and then it was just kind of over and I was left sitting there for a minute. But just one more thing… One thing I have always found kind of funny about Scandinavian films is how casually they just let everyone speak their own language. This is a Norwegian movie, yet you have Stellan Skarsgård speaking Swedish, his agent speaking in Danish, and everyone else sticking to Norwegian… and it doesn't really get acknowledged. It just exists as a normal thing. which I don't think I have ever done that… outside of a work setting… and only ever over email, never in person. And one more thing… I have not been a huge fan of modern Scandinavian media for a long time. Like streaming might have hurt American cinema a bit... sure… but it feels like Scandinavian film and TV took an even bigger hit. A lot of it has felt flat or safe. So going into this, I was honestly not expecting much… which made it even more surprising how incredible it ended up being. Genuinely one of the better things I have seen in a while, not only from a Scandinavian country but from anywhere.