Why Joachim Trier Dropped the Irony in ‘Sentimental Value’: “I Had to Be a Better Director”

For his latest film, Joachim Trier is playing it straight.

In his career to date, the Danish-Norwegian director has often pivoted between realism and moments where irony and the surreal puncture the everyday. Think of the dream-like narrative in his debut Reprise (2006) where the lives of two aspiring Oslo writers are told via jump-cut flash-forwards and imagined futures that undercut his characters’ youthful ambitions; of Thelma (2017), a sexual coming-of-age tale where a devout young woman’s suppressed desire manifests as telekinetic powers; or of the transcendent moment of cinematic magic in The Worst Person in the World (2021), when time stops as our heroine Julie (Renate Reinsve) runs through Oslo, past the city’s frozen citizens, in her escape from her ex-lover towards her future one.

There are no such moments in Sentimental Value (2025). For the family drama, about a film director father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgard), estranged from his two adult daughters, theater actress Nora (Reinsve) and academic historian Agnes (newcomer Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), Trier drops the irony.

“I grew up in the ’90s. I come from irony,” explains Trier, “but with this one, I needed to talk about intimate, more tender things. That matters to me now, and I don’t want to be ashamed of it.”

But telling a story straight doesn’t mean making it simple. Sentimental Value piles on layers of memory, cinema and cinema-as-memory to explore the reconciliatory power of art — and its real-world limits.

When Nora and Agnes’ mother dies, father Gustav returns. He’s written a new film, directly inspired by his own mother’s tragic story, that he thinks could be his great comeback. He wants daughter Nora to star in it. When she refuses, he casts American star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) and tries to get Kemp to mimic Nora in her performance. All this plays out against the Borg’s family home in Oslo, an old-world cottage that looks sprung from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, but holding generations of memories and trauma, embedded in its walls.

Sentimental Value premiered in Cannes, winning the festival’s runner-up Grand Prize, and is screening at the Toronto International Film Festival as it launches its award-season run. (Norway has picked it as its contender in the best international feature category).

Trier spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about childhood memories and generational trauma, about the healing power of art and how becoming a father changed the stories he wants to tell.

The family home plays a central role in this film. What’s your strongest memory from your childhood home?

I don’t know if I remember one memory above all the others, but what I can say is the repetition of a spatial experience. If I think about the area where I enter the front door, I can leaf through it like layers of time: The winter coming home sad, the summer coming home happy, slamming the door during an argument, taking off my shoes and sitting on the floor tired from something. All of life happened in that same space.

That becomes the framework of life and memory, and cinema can play with that. So I was thinking about spaces like that in this film. Not so much my family’s house, because we moved a lot. It was my grandparents’ house that was the continuous one, and that was being sold when [co-screenwriter Eskil] Vogt and I wrote this.

Was that the initial trigger for the story?

Not the story, but the context for it. I realized all of the 20th century had happened in that house. That house became a discussion between Eskil and I.

To start in a slightly different place, I’d say I’ve had two kids since the last movie, and I’ve asked myself questions about what I transfer to them and what was transferred to me. Realizing, for example, the trauma of my grandfather during the war — he was a resistance fighter, he barely survived, and then he became a film director — he wasn’t like Gustav Borg but the idea of that history affected my family. War has affected my family in many specific and unspecific ways. Does it take three generations to get rid of that?

Then, when I look at my kids, I think: Will they be as affected by the 20th century as I was? And the house witnessed all that. The house is the witness. Does that make sense? It’s hard to talk about it without being a bit philosophical. I don’t mean to pretend that I can get all that into a movie, but I think some of those notions came into it.

This film is incredibly direct, open and honest. It doesn’t have any irony or cinematic tricks like we saw you use in The Worst Person in the World, with the time-stopping scene or the psychedelic trip sequence.

I tried to be clear. I dared to be clear. We shot on 35mm, and the colors — if you use that as a metaphor — are more saturated, clear and well-balanced. It’s risky to balance colors on this level; it’s hard. That’s a metaphor for the emotions we wanted.

I knew I had great actors; I’m very privileged. The challenge of the film for me was how do we let that clarity and honesty come through when the film talks about the opposite: Our avoidance, our family’s inability to speak, the roles we give each other unconsciously. So much of the movie is about things that are unclear. So how does one tell that story in a straightforward way?

I grew up in the ’90s. I come from irony. And I like elegance. I want my films to be cool and fancy and fun, and I try not to lose that. But with this one, I needed to talk about intimate, more tender things. That matters to me now, and I don’t want to be ashamed of it. Cinema can do that. But it’s a balancing act — finding a space of absence for interpretation, so it doesn’t become too direct.

“Tenderness is the new pun.” That’s my new statement. People can laugh, call it a dad joke, but I’m like, “Fuck it.” I saw Peter Jackson’s [Beatles documentary] Get Back while we were writing this. It’s just these humans trying to talk about splitting up a band and making songs about it. Playing, but not talking about it. It’s beautiful. “Long and Winding Road” — Paul sitting with his best friends, feeling he’s slipping away from them and creating art around that. People express themselves directly in art and indirectly socially. So what if the father in this story was that kind of director: Lucid and clear in his art, but an avoiding asshole in real life? I found that interesting.

In terms of your stylistic approach, were there any cinema touchstones you were looking at? The film is, in the best way, not old-fashioned, but it seems to be of a slightly different era.

It’s many different things. We have some montage sequences that are more playful. We have some experimentation with triple exposure in a moment in the film, during the sermon. But I also had to try to be a better director. I mimed [Skarsgard’s character] Gustav Borg, who’s an old-school, one-wonder [i.e. extremely complex] shot, non-sequitur kind of director. We did this whole one-wonder shot from his [fictional] film Anna, that I had to direct — with a child crying in a field that leads into a train that she has to run on. Which was really fun.

I shoot on 35 mm. I still use dolly tracks a lot, but I also use handheld. I mix it all up. That’s what to me is modern: To find intimacy and mise-en-scène that’s appropriate to a human scale, somehow. Describing it now, it sounds like [Robert] Bresson or [Yasujirō] Ozu, whom I adore. But I think I’m a bit more messy than that. I’m moving around a bit more.

Obviously, people are going to say [Ingmar] Bergman because you’re Scandinavian and because of the family theme. Though watching it, a lot of it felt more like American ’70s movies in some ways.

Thank you. Yes, American cinema was a big influence. Completely. Woody Allen films of the ’70s. Paul Mazursky, that humanism. A lot of different things. Peter Bogdanovich. I could keep going. American ’70s cinema was such an important milestone in cinematic history.

And musically? Music is always a huge part of your films. Did you have the soundtrack in your head while writing this film?

I wasn’t sure it was going to work, but I wanted to have a soul folk sound. [American jazz guitarist] Terry Callier, who worked a lot with the producer Charles Stepney, who also did Minnie Riperton’s music—that kind of early-era American, very sophisticated orchestration. Very soulful, very emotional music. Also, Labi Siffre from the U.K., and a lot more soul and gospel things.

Then I’m mixing it up with some modern stuff — some New Order for the father, and some Roxy Music, because that was kind of his world. Music matters tremendously when we make films. I tell my friends, you can never hear Roxy Music on these great loudspeakers, like in cinemas behind the screen. That volume and that complexity of sound, even the best stereo, it’s really hard to get what you can actually do when you play a song in a film. The sound of that is remarkable.

Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas [who plays Anges] was, for me, the revelation of this film. Why did you think of her for this?

I wrote this for Renate and for Stellan. But then we had to find someone who could match Renate as her little sister. That’s not easy. I had casting sessions for six months. I met many, many people. It was the same way I met Anders [Danielsen Lie] and Renate, people that aren’t necessarily the most famous, but really turn out to be maybe the best.

The film seems to be saying something about the potential of art to do what might not be possible in personal relationships. Do you believe in the ability of art to reveal truths that are difficult to manage?

Yeah, I do. This is one of my first interviews on this, so bear with me, I’m still formulating this. But I’ve thought a lot about this the last few weeks, now that people are starting to see the film. We know there’s a lot of transference of unspokenness in a family. We know that. You can transfer grief or woundedness between parent and child without it ever being spoken. You can take on a burden of grief from a parent without knowing it — and carry it. I think people feel that’s true. I look at my own children and, as a parent, I think: What will I transfer to them that I’m unconscious of? Any responsible parent will ask that question. We’ve all done so.

I also see how children — before they can even have a verbal language — dance and sing. We can’t always defend art as something logical or as something that has a clear function. It’s just something we do. It’s inherently human. It’s our yearning to cope and express ourselves, to try to be seen.

It can give some people self-worth. It can give some people fame. It can give others a dearly needed outlet for something they’re unable to socially convey. Art can be many things. And for most people, it gets hidden away. But in the same way that mirroring effects in a family can harm a child, art can be a solution.

When I was working on the character of Gustav, I thought: This is a story of reconciliation. That’s when I realized: He was also a wounded child. But he could convey something in art.

And to be honest with you, when I sing a lullaby to my kids to help them sleep, that matters. That’s also art. Art is such a big word, but we are transferring all this stuff, also in a beautiful way, through art. It’s kind of the yin and the yang. All the shit we want to avoid transferring —it’s also a coping mechanism.

We see that with Renate’s character and Stellan’s character. They’re isolating themselves more and more. But they need something, somewhere to put themselves. And they can do that in the space of creativity.

And honestly, because art is often tied in with commerce, commodification and fame, saying this can sound privileged, but art can be very necessary for people. It’s actually a fundamental thing. It’s not just a luxury. In our society, everything’s fucking polarized. Everyone’s got a polemical opinion. I’m trying to say: Let’s listen. Let’s look. Let’s connect.

I think in cinema, at its best, there’s the possibility of seeing the other, or having some sense of contact. That’s what we’re playing with in this film. Sometimes it’s the impossibility of connection between characters, but that’s also interesting to work with.

So, yeah, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to get on a soapbox about art, but I’m feeling it. I feel that at the moment, it’s something very important. More than ever.

One element in the film that I feel has a connection to Bergman is how he connected to religion. Even though I’m not religious, I understand his sense of religion as a means of being in the world, as a ritual for surviving.

That’s well put. They talk about “the atheist prayer,” right? I’m also an atheist. I don’t believe in God. But I respect spirituality, that yearning for some meaning, that keeps going through most of the movies and art I’m interested in.