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

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,…