{"id":277893,"date":"2025-11-12T06:05:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T06:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/277893\/"},"modified":"2025-11-12T06:05:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T06:05:07","slug":"despite-stellar-work-from-stellan-skarsgard-sentimental-value-is-a-fixer-upper-of-a-family-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/277893\/","title":{"rendered":"Despite stellar work from Stellan Skarsgard, Sentimental Value is a fixer-upper of a family drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Stellan Skarsgard, left, and Elle Fanning in a scene from Sentimental Value.Kasper Tuxen\/The Associated Press<\/p>\n

Sentimental Value<\/p>\n

Directed by Joachim Trier<\/p>\n

Written by Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt<\/p>\n

Starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgard and Elle Fanning <\/p>\n

Classification PG; 133 minutes <\/p>\n

Opens in theatres Nov. 14 <\/p>\n

There are homes built to be in the movies (the Hollywood Hills\u2019 Chemosphere in Body Double, Frank Lloyd Wright\u2019s Ennis House from The Day of the Locust and Blade Runner), and then there are movies built to showcase homes \u2013 a reverse-engineered kind of cinema that lets the brick and mortar do most of the heavy narrative and thematic lifting. <\/p>\n

Director Joachim Trier\u2019s impressively and shamelessly crafted new drama Sentimental Value<\/a> is erected firmly in the latter camp, largely set inside an Oslo home whose worn but comforting elegance suggests a fairy-tale cottage that might have once been occupied by especially noble Vikings, but plunked straight into a modern Norway neighbourhood. <\/p>\n

The property \u2013 equipped with enough windows to ensure a reliable stream of natural light, a.k.a. the dream home of the world\u2019s fussiest cinematographer \u2013 even boasts a defining element too perfectly metaphorical: a crack in its foundation, the fissure crawling up one side of the wall like a varicose vein. <\/p>\n

The crack has been there for generations, we\u2019re told, but don\u2019t worry: The home is too sturdy to crumble. That\u2019s as good and tidy a summation of Sentimental Value\u2019s intentions as possible, with Trier delivering the latest in a long line of elegantly shot films (2015\u2019s Louder than Bombs, 2021\u2019s The Worst Person in the World) that presume to flatter and nourish audiences but instead end up dulling and starving them with their eager-to-please obviousness. You can see the property values depreciating from a mile away. <\/p>\n

Sentimental Value examines what\u2019s required for actors to play actors<\/a><\/p>\n

Real estate isn\u2019t the prime concern of the family who have inhabited the film\u2019s marquee property for close to a century, but it\u2019s certainly a preoccupation. The home\u2019s most recent occupant, the elderly mother of two sisters \u2013 one a revered actress in her prime named Nora (Renate Reinsve), the other a former child-star named Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) who has now settled into anonymous domesticity \u2013 has just died, and the children assume that the estate will be passed onto them for a tidy resale profit. <\/p>\n

But then their estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard) swoops in, the world-renowned filmmaker deciding that he would in fact like to move into the house \u2013 which was his own childhood home \u2013 and perhaps even make a new semi-autobiographical movie inside of it. To further strain the \u201csentimental\u201d part of the film\u2019s equation, Gustav wants Nora to play a facsimile of his own mother, who killed herself inside the place decades ago.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Renate Reinsve, left, plays a revered actress in her prime and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas plays the role of a former child-star.Kasper Tuxen\/The Associated Press<\/p>\n

That Gustav\u2019s film isn\u2019t titled something like If These Walls Could Talk is about the only restraint that Trier displays, the director otherwise proceeding to ram through all the heart-tugging motions, every conflict resolved with a too-finely calculated burst of polished Scandinavian catharsis. It is tidy, it is easy and it is, by the end, far too flinty. <\/p>\n

Still, even though Trier knows exactly which emotional buttons are available to him doesn\u2019t preclude him from pushing a few of the right ones now and then.<\/p>\n

\u2018We didn\u2019t talk politics at all\u2019: Andor stars Stellan Skarsgard and Genevieve O\u2019Reilly address the Empire in the room<\/a><\/p>\n

After Nora quickly turns Gustav\u2019s acting role down, the director \u2013 who hasn\u2019t made a movie in far too long, yet is revered in all the right film-festival circles (wishful thinking for Trier\u2019s later years, perhaps) \u2013 finds a substitute star in an American actress in the Elle Fanning mode. She is played, of course, by Elle Fanning. Seeking something more ambitious and vaguely European than the Hollywood pap that she is constantly offered (congratulations to whichever multiplexes program this film side by side with Predator: Badlands<\/a>), Fanning\u2019s ingenue Rachel Kemp becomes both an ally and victim of Gustav. <\/p>\n

At first, their relationship is just intriguing enough to buoy the entire exercise. And every member of the cast \u2013 including Reinsve, now a three-time Trier collaborator, and Skarsgard, who headlines the film with such profoundly amusing cocksure confidence that it is a total farce the film\u2019s producers are campaigning him as a \u201csupporting\u201d actor in the Oscar race instead of a lead \u2013 is fully locked in, committed for the long emotional haul. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, left, and Elle Fanning in a scene from Sentimental Value.Kasper Tuxen\/The Associated Press<\/p>\n

Yet once Rachel meets Nora and the substitute daughter angle is highlighted in bright, blinding yellow, the Gustav\/Rachel\/Nora dynamic wears thinner and thinner \u2013 even if the whole Rachel element allows for a solid Netflix joke aimed directly at the more high-brow Criterion Channel and MUBI subscribers in the crowd. <\/p>\n

It should be no spoiler to note that the final few moments of Sentimental Value bring the audience back inside the marquee Oslo house. But when Trier pulls the curtain back just a bit on his big, giant metaphorical manse, he inadvertently gives his entire game away. There really is no place like home. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Stellan Skarsgard, left, and Elle Fanning in a scene from Sentimental Value.Kasper Tuxen\/The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":277894,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[1397,49,48,75,337,2922],"class_list":{"0":"post-277893","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-appwebview","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-noastack"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}