Raise your hand if you like being vulnerable? Anyone? 

Apologies for creating a ‘Bueller? Bueller?’ situation without a proper avenue for response, but the question was mostly rhetorical anyway. Letting your guard all the way down is one of mankind’s most torturous experiences, to the point that entire industries have been born in its terrifying and necessary pursuit. Therapists and pharmaceutical companies spring immediately to mind, as do any number of philosophers and influencers, but storytelling, across any medium, remains an enduring pathway to express the want, pain, and anxiety that rests inside all of us. Writer/director Joachim Trier has been slowly chipping away at his own armor for years, but it wasn’t until the 2021 release of The Worst Person in the World that the Danish-Norwegian filmmaker’s naked emotionality finally broke through stateside. Clever, vivacious, and deeply affecting, the movie became an instant speak-easy for cinephiles who saw something of themselves in Renate Reinsve’s star-making performance, turning Trier’s follow-up into a soul-baring event even before the project took shape. Crafting something genuinely cathartic is hard enough in private, but with a global community waiting patiently to be rocked to their core, Trier did the most human thing imaginable; he found a place to hide.

He’s got company in the shadows, joined there by Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), a vaunted helmer in his own right whose celebrated filmography is winding to a close. An absentee father since leaving home to focus on his career some decades ago, Borg returns to Oslo after the death of his ex-wife to a reception that’s less than warm and fuzzy. At least his youngest daughter, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) will give him the time of day, which is more than you can say of Nora (Reinsve), a tempestuous stage actress with no designs on reconciliation. After refusing to even read the screenplay that Gustav wrote with her in mind, Nora is replaced in the fledgling production by Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), an American actress looking to pair her household fame with some hard-won artistic respectability. The Borg’s familial sphere is good for a reputational glow-up, as well as an anvil of sorrow.

The density of their misery represents a tonal change-up from Worst Person, which, for all its sweeping empathy and mournful asides, is ostensibly a coming-of-age flick, buttressing dreary lows with the humor and exhilaration of young, irresponsible adulthood. Like its characters, Value’s stabs at comedy feel purposefully half-hearted, revealing ache when all the polite laughter has subsided. This is most pronounced in Nina and her ongoing bout with depression, replacing Reinsve’s innate charisma and vivacity with sunken eyes and sideways glances. You believe every second, but verisimilitude isn’t the same as engagement, and Trier struggles to find things for her to do in a role that’s definitionally inert. Lashing out in a primal rage is a right of passage for many actresses angling for greatness, but the animalistic verve of Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia or Natalie Portman in Jackie is only present in her introductory sequence, quickly ushered away in favor of something that’s both more true and less scintillating. 

She leaves a void for her castmates to fill, and while Reinsve’s co-stars are uniformly excellent, picking out their Oscar clips will prove quite the challenge. That’s a good thing for the most part, and Trier should be commended for not slamming on the breaks to revel in histrionics like so many of his peers, but audiences are used to receiving their pound of scalding, throat-clearing flesh. Lilleaas finally gets one near the end, though it takes all her might to steal the scene from Skarsgård, a thespian capable of demanding attention without moving a muscle. An instant member of the filmic bad dad hall of fame, his taciturn remove will be knowable to an unfortunate number of viewers, too pleased with his own venerated intellect to notice the years of damage he’s wrought. Even Kemp, who’s new to the auteur’s wayward song-and-dance, clearly doesn’t know what to make of him. Her attempts to break his poker-faced facade, which include studying up on accent work and dying her hair to match Nina’s, unwittingly turn her into a surrogate daughter, reframing Vertigo with an entirely different calculus.

Borg admiration of Alfred Hitchcock’s enigmatic masterpiece feels like a given, particularly in light of the movie’s funniest passage, wherein the director gifts his 9-year-old grandson a stack of DVDs that includes Irreversible and The Piano Teacher. You get the sense that Borg and Trier alike would love to have their names on something as daring and proudly European as those aforementioned affronts, and Value’s most persuasive duress is aimed at an industry that’s lost bravery and primacy alike. Jabs at Netflix, TikTok, and shriveling attention spans run rampant, bucking up against the movie’s constant citations of both Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov. They add texture to a movie with no shortage of the stuff, and from a literary perspective, almost all of it plays, but putting it on screen is a different endeavor. Writing a love letter to an art form as it gasps its last breath calls the gloriously venomous Babylon to mind, but Damien Chazelle’s bad taste epic had enough sweaty chutzpah to imitate the magic before taking it away. Trier’s still working through the loss on his own time.

He’s got plenty to show for his troubles, and there’s a chance that more will be unveiled in subsequent viewings. Built like a briar patch but gliding like a dream, Sentimental Value is often so impressive that it forgets to be good, believing that its handsome mounting, wizened insights on sisterhood, and thickets of academia collectively constitute a major work. In truth, they’re more like a fortress; brawny, imposing, and impenetrable, claiming to desire an open, emotional dialogue, but keeping you at arm’s length with all of its laudable moving parts. The ambition and achievement shouldn’t be taken for granted, just as any well-articulated defensive stance shouldn’t be dismissed. Something’s being secreted away behind all that lattice work. Good luck trying to reach it.