Released: 25th December 2025
Seen: 28th February 2026
It’s often hard to figure out how to open these reviews; the style developed almost a decade ago out of an understanding that a single paragraph would be placed above the fold, and I’ve just carried that on like it was a standard element of writing. Something that just happened several years ago for no particular reason is now locked in, will probably be standard until something dramatic changes, and I’m forced to re-evaluate how things are done… You could consider that process to be something of an imperfect metaphor for Sentimental Value, a film that revolves around the idea of how things that happened in the past can still have a massive impact on people several years later. Is it the best metaphor out there? No, is it the best I could do for this opening paragraph that inevitably means nothing other than tone setting for the rest of the review? Also no, but it’s what we’ve got.
Sentimental Value focuses on the Borg family. The patriarch of the family, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) and his wife Sissel (Ida Marianne Vassbotn Klasson) had a happy marriage at one point but eventually they would divorce and Gustav would leave his home in Norway and go off to have a career as a film director, leaving his wife Sissel to raise their two daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Decades later, after Sissel’s passing, Gustav returned to the home that the family had lived in to try and talk Nora into taking part in his film but both her and Agnes generally want nothing to do with him due to his absence and alcoholism. For the rest of the film, Nora and Agnes have to try to come to terms with the pain that their father’s actions caused them, what parts of his own history caused him to behave like that and if they can actually forgive him.
Sentimental Value is one of those subtle, slow-burning dramas that works on a lot of layers, forgoing big moments of dramatic shock and letting the naturalistic performances and realistic story pull the audience into the emotion of everything. It chooses not to go too over the top, the thing that separates the father from his kids isn’t something truly awful and unforgivable, there’s not that many moments of someone screaming in laborious close up while spit flies everywhere, it’s just a calm quiet film that slowly reveals the open wounds that this family has been dealing with and how it’s impacted their lives. It’s almost boringly realistic at times, we’ve all seen families that have this exact dynamic and it feels like we’ve just been dropped into their lives for a few weeks to see if they can get along.
What really does make the story more interesting is how Gustav never seems to fully understand what he actually did to make his daughters resent him, and how they can never express it. Scenes of Gustav trying to act like everything’s normal, like it’d just be fine if he came home and used the house to film his passion project, contrasted with Nora glaring daggers at him or literally fleeing the house to avoid him, make for some truly great moments. Sentimental Value is also smart in its use of an outsider, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) as a catalyst for things to come to a head, since she is brought in to play the role that Gustav wanted Nora to play and he treats her better than he ever treated his daughters. That really allows everyone a moment to shine, to call out how he wasn’t there or how he’s trying to essentially recreate his daughter to try and get it right.
All of this is helped by performances that are so rich and layered that it just feels like we’ve been stuck in a real family with real problems. These intriguing, subtle, subdued performances all manage to keep the emotion building slowly throughout the runtime until the genuinely sweet and pure climax of the film… that admittedly feels like a bit of a copout after everything that’s come before, but it’s a well-performed copout by a cast that are truly delivering on all fronts. There’s a reason why four of these performances have been given Oscar nominations this year, every single one of the performers are delivering some of their greatest work here, from Renate Reinsve as Nora who probably has the most intense scenes including a powerful panic attack right near the start, to Stellan as Gustav who can show so much pain with just a single look. It’s a set of performances that work together perfectly; it’s no shock they all had to be nominated because they all work together so well.
As I mentioned though, the ending of Sentimental Value does feel a little bit too easy for this story and turns something that had the potential to be powerful into something a little saccharine. It also has a few moments that feel a little bit too abrupt in how it resolves some major elements of the story, which is wild because the real problem that I ended up having with the film is how most of it was just kind of slow and drab. It’s trying so hard to be realistic that at times it was just hard to properly engage with the film, the story is so subtle and subdued that you really have to work to meet the film where it is and for some people that can be what they like but for others (the person reviewing this right now, as an example) it can just be a chore. It’s not the kind of film I feel the urge to want to rewatch, its slow, ponderous tone just doesn’t engage me like it clearly wants to.
Sentimental Value is undeniably a very good film; the performances are fantastic and it’s beautifully shot with a lot of moments that are genuinely brilliant. It’s no wonder it’s one of the big Oscar films of the year… but it’s also just a hard sit at times, so subtle and subdued that it’s easy to lose interest in it at any moment. Unless you’re really into slow-moving Norwegian dramas, I can’t see how this is going to change your mind, but it’s undeniably a good film if you’re into that sort of thing.
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