Sentimental Value, which won the Oscar for Best International Feature in 2026 and which opens on Thursday at theaters around Israel, was one of my favorite movies this year. Had I been an Academy Awards voter, I would have picked it in all nine categories in which it received nominations, including Best Picture.
It’s a character-driven, complex story about the drama of an extremely dysfunctional show-business family. It is unquestionably the best-acted movie this year, and it also has incredibly funny moments.
It’s the most recent collaboration between Norwegian writer/director Joachim Trier and actress Renate Reinsve, who previously worked together on The Worst Person in the World, the story of a confused young woman who tries on different identities as she moves through various relationships.
To say that the two work well together would be an understatement. Reinsve is one of the most interesting young actresses and was far more deserving of the Best Actress Oscar this year for her performance in Sentimental Value than the overwrought Jessie Buckley, who won for Hamnet.
Trier is a quirky, engaging director whose work combines elements of the styles of Francois Truffaut and Ingmar Bergman, leaning more heavily toward Truffaut. His debut feature, Reprise, about two young writers who become frenemies, which came out 20 years ago, was a treat, a literary story that was witty and engaging.
A story of two sisters' complex relationship
Sentimental Value is about two sisters, Nora (Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), and their complex relationship with each other and with their estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard).
Nora is a celebrated actress who is having an affair with her married director. She suffers from stage fright and needs a great deal of reassurance before her performances. Agnes is a married historian who is devoted to her son, Erik (Oyvind Hesjedal Loven), and whose family doesn’t have much money.
While there are conflicts between the sisters, they are united in their disdain for Gustav, a once-celebrated movie director who has been having trouble getting movies made in recent years.
There is an interesting dynamic between the sisters that goes back to their childhood. When they were much younger, Gustav saw Agnes as a gifted actress and cast her in a movie that is considered his masterpiece. But when they grew up, Agnes abandoned acting, while Nora embraced it, hoping to draw their father’s attention. After their mother, a psychotherapist, divorced their father, he left Norway and barely kept in touch.
The movie opens with their mother’s death, and Gustav’s return to claim the house the girls grew up in, which is still in his name. This beautiful Oslo home functions like a character in the film, and parallels are drawn between the fates of the house and its residents, past and present, and the classic Ibsen role that Nora performs, the lead in A Doll’s House.
When he returns to Norway, Gustav tries to rebuild a relationship with his daughters. While Agnes is somewhat receptive, feeling he may make a decent grandfather, Nora rejects him. He tries to give her a screenplay he wrote for her to act in about his mother, a Norwegian resistance fighter who was arrested and tortured by the Nazis, and who killed herself after the war, in their home, when he was a child. Nora won’t even read it.
Frustrated, Gustav gives the screenplay to Rachel (Elle Fanning), a young American movie star he meets at a festival that is having a retrospective of his early work. She loves it, and he casts her, which leads to a Netflix deal and to translating the script into English.
But it’s clear that the earnest Rachel, who truly venerates Gustav and his work, is all wrong for this part, which was written with Nora in mind. At the same time, Agnes goes to the national archives to read a statement Gustav’s mother wrote about her wartime ordeal.
At first, it might seem as if the movie is going to move along a predictable track. After all, we’ve seen many movies where a father who abandoned his family comes back to seek forgiveness and redemption. But the story gains in complexity as it goes along, and you may find yourself feeling critical of characters you liked at first and feeling compassion toward some you didn’t.
The show-business background makes it all a little more fun than it would have been otherwise, but many people will relate to the characters’ struggles in finding a way to move forward and put some of their resentment and pain behind them.
The weakest parts of the story are the reenactments that accompany Agnes’s research into her grandmother’s death, but this is a quibble. It might have been more meaningful had we simply heard her words read aloud, rather than acted out in a documentary style that feels jarring compared to the rest of the film.
But it’s an important part of the storyline, for several reasons. It takes the movie out of the upper-class world the characters now inhabit and frames it in the context of a not-so-long-ago tragedy, showing how the protagonists are influenced by this trauma, the result of a young woman who took an incredibly brave stance against injustice and hatred.
It also makes Gustav’s decision to base the screenplay intended for his daughter on the moment that changed his childhood forever much more interesting.
Despite the drama, 'Sentimental Value' shines with dark humor
As dramatic as all this is, when I look back on the film, which I saw when it opened the Jerusalem Film Festival last year, among the parts I remember most vividly are several very funny scenes, most of them involving Gustav and his dark sense of humor.
While all the actors are good, Stellan Skarsgard is the standout, and he somehow makes us care for this narcissist who has caused so much pain. Skarsgard has been memorable in roles as varied as the tormented hero of the brooding Scandinavian drama Out Stealing Horses and one of Meryl Streep’s old boyfriends in the musical comedy Mamma Mia! But he has never been better than he is here.
Reinsve has the showiest role in the movie, and while she’s electrifying in the highly dramatic scenes, she’s also good in the quieter moments, especially in the scenes with her father and sister. Lilleaas has a part that could have been forgettable, but she makes Agnes so real that she elicits intense sympathy. Elle Fanning makes the American actress into a sympathetic counterpart to the two sisters rather than a clueless outsider.
In a time when so many movies feature cartoonish storylines, Sentimental Value is a gem, and it’s worth seeing on the big screen before it makes its streaming debut.