Sisters Nora and Agnes reunite with their estranged father, the charismatic Gustav, a once-renowned director who offers stage actress Nora a role in what he hopes will be his comeback film. When Nora turns it down, she soon discovers he has given her part to an eager young Hollywood star.
Ratings
Curator score: 9.1/10
IMDb: 7.7/10
Letterboxd: 4.15/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 95%
Metacritic: 86
TMDB: 7.5/10
Director
Joachim Trier
Production
Mer Film, Eye Eye Pictures, Lumen, Zentropa Entertainments, Komplizen Film, BBC Film
Cast
Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning, Anders Danielsen Lie, Jesper Christensen, Lena Endre, Cory Michael Smith, Catherine Cohen, Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud, Øyvind Hesjedal Loven, Lars Väringer, Ida Marianne Vassbotn Klasson, Vilde Søyland, Sigrid Lorentzen Abelsnes, Mari Strand Ferstad, Eiril Tormodsdatter Solberg, Julia Küster, Olivia Thompson, Iben Policer Havnevik
Where to watch
Hulu
Curator Review
Verdict
A piercing family drama about estrangement, inheritance, and the way art can become both a weapon and a bridge. It sounds emotionally devastating but also wry, observant, and formally elegant, with a strong sense of place and a sharp eye for the damage parents leave behind.
Best for
Viewers who like intimate, character-driven dramas
Fans of stories about complicated father-daughter relationships
People drawn to films about grief, memory, and family inheritance
Audiences who appreciate understated but emotionally intense European cinema
Viewers interested in art-world or filmmaking stories
Skip if
You want a plot-heavy movie with constant external action
You prefer lighter, more comforting family dramas
You dislike emotionally raw stories about parental abandonment
You are not in the mood for quiet, reflective, dialogue-driven filmmaking
Overview
Sentimental Value is the kind of family drama that turns a dinner table, a house, and a casting decision into emotional fault lines. The setup is simple but loaded: an estranged father returns with a film project that doubles as an attempt at reconciliation, and every gesture carries the weight of old injuries, unspoken expectations, and sibling history. It plays like a story about art, but the real subject is the inheritance of pain.
Worth noting
What makes it especially potent is how it treats family as a system of projections. Parents see their children as extensions of unfinished lives; children learn to read love as performance, absence as personality, and forgiveness as a kind of labor. The reviews suggest a film that is both devastating and darkly funny, with a house renovation and a modernized interior becoming a visual metaphor for emotional erasure.
Bottom line
This is very much for viewers who like their dramas precise, humane, and a little merciless. If you respond to films that observe the quiet violence of family dynamics and the uneasy overlap between personal life and artistic ambition, this should land hard.
Top Letterboxd reviews
marcus (5★) · 38901 likes
“but we didn’t have the same childhood, i had you”
ash (4★) · 34019 likes
Daddy issues, eldest-daughter trauma, Netflix stopping a character’s passion project from screening theatrically, and a beautiful house undergoing a modern grey renovation; this is covertly the scariest movie of the year.
júlia (5★) · 31536 likes
every kid's dream is to receive the piano teacher and irreversible as a gift
Matt Singer (3.5★) · 30605 likes
Apparently having a movie director for a father is not as fun as Francesca Scorsese’s Instagram account makes it seem.
jarod (4.5★) · 25160 likes
everything is our parents, except our parents, who are their parents. the interminable cycle of projection that governs essentially every aspect of our emotional lives on full display. fabulous!
2011 · Drama, Romance · 1h 38m · R · Curator 7.5/10 (17.7K ratings) · Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video, fuboTV, Philo, OVID, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
For its aching portrait of love, abandonment, and the self-destructive pull of emotional dependency.