The ending of Sentimental Value choked me up, but that’s only because Labi Siffre’s “Cannock Chase” started playing and that’s the only way I can respond to its opening curlicues of acoustic guitar. I wanted to be more genuinely emotional about what Joachim Trier’s new movie offers elsewhere because I like so much of it: its best-of-the-year-excellent performances from its quartet of leads (Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Reinsve, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, and Elle Fanning), a great joke about an IKEA stool and an even better one about the infamously brutal movies The Piano Teacher (2001) and Irreversible (2002), and two wonderful scenes cocooned by a lot of less-memorably good ones. In one, its Reinsve- and Lilleaas-portrayed sisters have a tender moment while tearily cuddling in bed. In the other, Reinsve, who plays a temperamental but talented stage actress, in the moments leading up to a show proceeds to have a panic attack that even a pleaded-for slap to the face from a co-star (Anders Danielsen Lie, who was in Trier’s last movie, 2021’s The Worst Person in the World, with Reinsve) can’t snap her out of.

Everything else about Sentimental Value is so overdetermined and subtlety-averse that not a lot feels organic about its story of a family that’s been emotionally stunted by a semi-estranged, laurels-resting movie-director patriarch (Skarsgård) who only knows how to be vulnerable and outwardly compassionate through filmmaking. (Lest short-but-effective allusions not be enough, Trier employs expositorily literary voiceover not only to supplement what the characters can be assumed to be thinking and feeling but also on several flashbacks that clarify that the Skarsgård character’s reserve around his daughters is in large part because of passed-down trauma from his mother, a resistance fighter who was viciously tortured by the Nazis upon capture and years later died by suicide.)

Read the full review at 425.

Photo credit: Kasper Tuxen Andersen/Neon