‘Sentimental Value’: Read The Screenplay For Joachim Trier’s Cannes Winner About Artists, Family And Trauma
Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind the year’s most talked-about movies continues with the Cannes Film Festival-premiering Sentimental Value, Neon‘s complex, multilayered drama from writer Eskil Vogt and co-writer/director Joachim Trier. Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga lbsdotter Lilleaas, and Elle Fanning.
The film won the coveted Grand Prix award at Cannes, is Norway’s official submission International Feature Film at the Oscars and has become a frontrunner in several above-the-line categories this awards season. The film picked up eight Golden Globes nominations including Best Picture – Drama and acting noms for Reinsve, Skarsgård, Lilleaas and Fanning, and seven Critics Choice nominations including Best Picture, with both also nominating the original screenplay (which is ineligible for WGA Awards consideration).
The pic also landed a leading eight European Film Awards noms, and it cracked the shortlist for the Oscars in the International Feature Film category.
The film opens by introducing the Borg family’s ancestral home as a character in its own right — a living vessel of memory that tells the family’s story, particularly concerning the two adult sisters Nora (Reinsve) and Agnes (Lilleaas), and the departure of their father. This perspective immediately establishes the house, with its metaphorical “crack in the home,” as the central emotional battleground.
The drama ignites following the sisters’ mother’s wake, with the abrupt return of their estranged father, Gustav (Skarsgård), an acclaimed but aging director.
Gustav’s reappearance is not a genuine apology, but a transactional offer: the lead role in his new film, which he plans to shoot at the family home. Nora, a volatile actress struggling with crippling stage fright, is consumed by deep resentment over her father’s abandonment. She flatly refuses the role and abruptly leaves following a heated argument.
The tension quickly escalates. Gustav, whose relationships are defined by his art, connects in France with rising American star Rachel Kemp (Fanning) and offers her Nora’s part. Nora’s shock upon discovering Rachel’s presence at the house confirms her worst fear: her father views his family primarily as artistic inspiration and material for his work.
The script masterfully uses Gustav’s film-within-a-film — based on the traumatic life and suicide of his own mother — as a vehicle for the unspoken communication between father and daughter.
As Rachel prepares for the role, she comes to a key realization that the part, seemingly about the grandmother, is perhaps more about Nora herself. The script is Gustav’s desperate attempt to communicate the pain and inherited trauma he can’t express verbally.
The true emotional heart is revealed when Nora reads the rejected script aloud to Agnes. The line, “I want a home,” triggers a profound, tearful breakthrough. The sisters’ bond, defined by their shared experience of a “broken home,” becomes the ultimate source of healing, overriding their father’s manipulative artistry.
The screenplay, co-written by Trier and Vogt, is being praised for its honesty in depicting how conflicted artists use their work to process personal trauma, even as they inflict pain on those closest to them, making the movie a profound cinematic essay on love, art and the painful legacies families leave behind.
Read the screenplay below.
