At the Cannes press conference for Sentimental Value, director Joachim Trier declared that “tenderness is the new punk.” The Norwegian filmmaker framed this in opposition to the division that is omnipresent in the world, but there’s truth to the statement in another sense. That there’s something radical in listening and embracing the other. There’s something powerful, too, in learning to look outward—to consider that offering a hand can be also personally transformative. Maybe this all sounds a little “be kind” nicecore, but Trier grounds the miraculous Sentimental Value in such emotional complexity that not a single moment of tenderness rings false. 

Trier’s films, particularly his Oslo trilogy, have routinely had a narrow focus, honing in on young messy individuals navigating their way through a world they’re still trying to understand. With Sentimental Value, the director opens up his scope to look at a discordant family: Nora (Renate Reinsve, returning after The Worst Person in the World) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) are tight-knit sisters bonded forever after difficult childhoods spent listening to their parents’ fights. The house they grew up in acts as a guiding centre for the story, a place that’s seen more anger, joy and heartbreak than the generations that have walked through its halls. Told through an evocative school essay, a young Nora imagines her gorgeous cherry wood home as a living creature that loved when it was full of life. When her father, celebrated film director Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) leaves the sisters to return to Sweden following his divorce, “the house missed the sounds he made,” she writes.

Years later, Nora is a stage actor overcome by stage fright on the opening night of her play at Oslo’s National Theatre. Gustav’s absence has cast such an enormous shadow on both sisters’ lives that they don’t quite know how to act when he reappears at their mother’s funeral. Agnes is non-confrontational, but Nora is angry and avoidant, even more so when Gustav offers her the leading role in his first film in 15 years. In many ways, Sentimental Value is about the power of cinema to elucidate the feelings we don’t have the courage to express ourselves. Gustav’s script excavates his fraught relationship with his own mother, as if all he merely wants Nora to say she forgives him—even if it’s only through fiction.

But Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt’s complex portrait goes deeper, suggesting that even art has its limitations. Trier considers whether it could even be exploitative. Held back by his inability to forge deep connections outside of a movie set, Gustav’s transactional brand of love is dependent on how useful his family are for his productions. Agnes remains distraught over the fact that the greatest period in her life was when he starred in her father’s film as a child, one of the rare times that she had his whole attention. Still, Nora and Gustav are so plagued by their inability to communicate with each other that cinema is the only outlet available to them. Meanwhile, Agnes begins her own investigation into the details of her grandmother’s past. Her curiosity to discover her family’s lineage of despair sends her on the path to reconciliation.

When Nora turns Gustav’s offer down, he instead turns to Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), an American actress he meets during his retrospective at the Deauville Film Festival. In less dexterous hands, the idea of an outsider intruding on a decidedly Scandinavian production would be played solely for comedy, but Trier and Vogt’s delicate screenplay strikes a balance between humour and deep empathy. Rachel may have made her name in Hollywood, but she’s never shallow, and Fanning is delightful as an actor who yearns for more in her career but struggles to find her place in the part. Her scenes with Skarsgård are some of the most affecting because of their warmth–Gustav exhibits a more paternal relationship with his leading actress than his own daughters. Over script sessions, he deflects Rachel’s questions back to her with a patient “what do you think?” He guides her to the answers she already knows, and the ones he avoids saying aloud.

Sentimental Value resists easy answers too. Trier displays immense trust in his cast, who telegraph the magnitude of their characters’ feelings through their faces alone, captured in long silent shots. I think back to The Worst Person in the World, when Reinsve’s Julie, awash in the orange glow of sunlight, expresses her bottomless grief and luminescent joy all in a teary-eyed sigh of relief. Sentimental Value is replete with those moments, and Skarsgård and Reinsve are especially rich canvases for emotion. There’s a sweet wordless scene between Gustav and Nora, a rare truce clouded in cigarette where they exchange inquisitive but hesitant smiles—they could even be described as loving, if not for the shared history that indicates this is only ephemeral. Later in the same night, Gustav tears down his daughter, perhaps without even realising it. There’s a heartbreaking tension between two people who so desperately want to reconnect but lack the blueprint to do so. But in the mature, profound and oh so quietly shattering Sentimental Value, even just trying can be enough.