This story of family, art and legacy is already tipped to win the best film Oscar

Every year, there is a foreign-language film that – by a mysterious but powerful common consent – reaches the top tier of contenders in the Oscars race. Five years ago, Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Oscar for best film, the first foreign-language film to win that glittering prize. This year, two outsiders are part of every awards discussion: It Was Just an Accident, by the heroic Iranian dissident director Jafar Panahi, and Sentimental Value, by Norway’s Joachim Trier.

This is not Trier’s first ride in the Oscar rodeo. His film The Worst Person in the World was an international arthouse hit in 2021, partly thanks to a glowing central performance by Renate Reinsve as the eponymous anti-heroine. Reinsve is back in Sentimental Value as Nora, a fragile theatre actor locked in a difficult battle of wills with her father Gustav, a once-celebrated film director who desperately wants her to play the lead in his proposed comeback – and probably final - film. Reinsve is just as compelling in this very different persona, while Stellan Skarsgard, as Gustav, gives the greatest performance of an already grand career.

There is a pleasing twist here. Sentimental Value is a film about home, intimacy, familiar spaces, lifelong friendships and childhood scars. The film Gustav wants to make emerges from his own life and culture; one of its crucial aspects is that it should be in his own language. He is also determined to shoot it in the beautiful, ramshackle old house where Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) grew up: the house from which he was so often absent. “I’m obsessed with the idea of memory, how the memory works, in all my films,” says Trier. “I thought the house gave a perspective of time, a historical presence around the family.” The house is a patient witness; it feels as if their lives are inscribed in its timber walls.

Specific, personal and local though it is, Sentimental Value has captivated even those audiences who might have difficulty pinpointing Norway on a map. There is, admittedly, a recognisable Hollywood element in the person of Elle Fanning as Rachel Kemp, a famous American actor keen to get out of her commercial groove. Rachel/Elle takes on the part of the daughter in Gustav’s film when Nora turns him down.

This changes the nature of the film he is making, of course: it will now have to be in English. The profundity and ultimate impossibility of that change emerges only gradually; it is actually Rachel, struggling with her translated lines, who recognises it first. “I think there is a world in which Gustav could have made a film with Elle’s character if it were the right project. They could maybe have made a film in English,” says Trier. “The problem is that Gustav yearns for deeper resolution.”

An early scene shows Nora and Agnes hosting a wake for their mother at the old house. Agnes is a historian – a mother, grounded, a serial coper – while Nora is intense, capricious, a bundle of grudges and fears lurking under her vivid charm. Gustav, long divorced from their mother, is a late arrival, bringing with him a blast of awkwardness along with the cold Oslo air, but this is Scandinavia: there are no confrontations, just Trier’s use of close-ups, snatches of music and escalating silences to build a sustained, unbreakable tension.

“It’s about building emotions so you can afford silences,” says Trier. This is the sixth film he has written with his friend and collaborator Eskil Vogt. “The first couple were criticised a lot at script level by people who thought that there wasn’t enough external conflict in our stories. We had a lot of conversations about that, and we realised we are more interested in internal conflict and character. I’m very bad at writing antagonists. Whenever I try to write a conflict, let’s say in this case with a difficult father, I immediately want to try to understand him. You don’t have to forgive them, but you have to be open to the fact that people are multi-faceted – and that even if we want to do well with each other, we fail tremendously.”

In his heart, Gustav still believes that artists like him don’t have to follow other people’s rules. He was a father, but he had work to do; he needed his freedom. “Gustav, in all his classic, narcissistic idea of the autonomous artist as someone outside of society, is also unconsciously trying to excuse himself for being such an incompetent and bad father to a daughter who is actually very similar to him,” says Trier. “And they love each other. I see it as a sad love story between a father and daughter.

“The interesting thing is that he’s not completely wrong. I think it’s interesting for art to have a sense of freedom and autonomy and I think art’s role in society is not to fall into the clear functionality of all the other categories of societal needs. But on the other side you also need to be a responsible human being, or you will be very lonely, which I think is what he’s going through. It’s kind of a comment on a generational conflict going on there.”

Like so many bohemians before him, Gustav has relied for support on his band of artistic brothers. Trier, 51, knows himself how crucial that confederacy can be; he has been working with the same key crew and troupe of actor friends since he started making short films in his early 20s. “I now have a family, I have children: an experience I longed for,” he says. “But I think at many periods of my life I’ve been that person who found connection through my wonderful collaborators.

“So I’m also commenting on that in this film. I try not to throw the professional life under the bus by saying that it’s inferior and stupid, and you should just stay home. I’m trying to talk about the complexity and ambivalence of it all. That there are also synthetic families that are very important in life, you know. I hope I don’t seem to say anything simple about that because it’s kind of a mystery – and a beautiful one.”

Audiences love Sentimental Value; the film has already won the Grand Prix in Cannes, an award for the entire cast at the Palm Springs festival and eight Golden Globe nominations, among many other gongs. According to Variety magazine’s list of predictions, it is a serious rival to Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another for the best film Oscar. Of course, a lot could happen between now and March. Meanwhile, Joachim Trier’s story of family rift and reconciliation speaks with all due humility to our troubled time.

“There are so many films about people under pressure doing harm to each other and I needed a different vibe,” says Trier. “The big theme at the moment is the big divide of everything, the big conflict of everything. I understand you want to go to the window and scream ‘I’m mad as hell and I don’t want to take it’. I’m an old punk, so I get it. That must exist! But we also, next to that, need some tenderness and love. And hope! I wanted to tell a story with some hope inside.”

Sentimental Value opens on Christmas Day.