‘Sentimental Value’ is a quietly tender family drama about two sisters living with unresolved trauma after their parents’ separation many years earlier, and a father who remains emotionally distant but curiously insistent on reconnecting through his work. He’s a celebrated film director whose reputation for sensitive, psychologically astute cinema stands in sharp contrast to the fractured relationships in his own life.

His latest project draws on deeply personal material – inspired by his mother’s experience and her death by suicide – but it also seems to be a roundabout attempt to process his broken relationship with his daughters. He wants his daughter Nora, played by Renate Reinsve, to star in the film, believing he understands her life well enough to represent it on screen. From her perspective, though, this feels like yet another misreading – a man who has observed her from a distance, not lived alongside her.

When Nora refuses the role, it goes instead to a Hollywood star, played by Elle Fanning. That casting choice introduces a subtle but powerful dissonance: the idea of someone else – glamorous, American, external – embodying a life that is not really hers. It raises uneasy questions about authorship, ownership, and whether lived experience can ever be faithfully translated through art.

What the film does beautifully is avoid melodrama. It unfolds patiently, almost therapeutically, allowing tensions to simmer rather than explode. This is cinema as a form of emotional processing – not resolution, but recognition. When the actress eventually pulls out of the project, it exposes another fault line: the father seems capable of offering warmth and attentiveness to a surrogate daughter in a way he never quite managed with his own.

‘Sentimental Value’ ultimately asks whether creative work can heal old wounds – or whether it merely reopens them in a different form. It’s restrained, thoughtful, and deeply humane, lingering long after it ends.