“It’s hard to love someone without mercy.”

Sitting across the dinner table from his actress daughter after sweeping back into her life with a high-concept plan for reconciliation, acclaimed filmmaker and absent father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) offers that wisdom to Nora (Renate Reinsve) as if directing her on how to forgive him. And in the wake of his ex-wife’s death, that’s precisely what Gustav intends to do — not by apologizing for his decision to leave their family when Nora was still just a child, but rather by casting her in an autobiographical Netflix drama about his own life.

Exploitative as that sounds, Gustav isn’t just hoping to make Nora say the words he’s always longed to hear from his firstborn daughter in exchange for a cut of Ted Sarandos’ money. On the contrary, his plan — like everything else in the transcendently moving “Sentimental Value,” a layered masterpiece that “The Worst Person in the World” director Joachim Trier has been working toward for his entire career — is layered with a delicate sense of personal history. Because the (once) great auteur Borg doesn’t intend for Nora to play a version of herself in his movie. No, he insists on using her as a stand-in for his mother, who committed suicide in the sun-bathed Oslo house that has belonged to their family since at least the start of World War II.

Gustav has never understood the reasons why his mother took her own life after kissing him goodbye one morning — he was only a child at the time. Now a 70-year-old Volker Schlöndorff-type who’s been fading toward irrelevance in the 15 years since his last narrative feature (and has only found late-career success by entombing himself in a documentary about his life’s work), Gustav is convinced that the answers he seeks are still hiding somewhere in the Borg’s ancestral home. That home contains several generations of secret feelings that will only reveal themselves to those who know how to find the cracks in its foundation.

Nora — whose emotional avoidance has fueled the same acting career that it threatens to derail with stage fright, as we see in a funny and spectacularly fraught scene where she demands that her married lover (Trier mainstay Anders Danielsen Lie) either fuck or slap her before she greets the opening night audience of her latest play — has zero interest in helping Gustav look for where those cracks might be. She also vehemently rejects her father’s offer to star in his film. But as he charges forward with the project anyway (which he intends to shoot in the actual house that inspired its story, and still legally belongs to him), each of the surviving Borgs will be forced to navigate the resentful ocean of lost time that stretches between the truth of who their parents actually were, and the fiction of the characters they’ve created for them to play in their minds.

Few recent movies have reconciled the difference between those distant shores with the same tenderness that “Sentimental Value” achieves by the end of its soul-melting final sequence (though Charlotte Wells’ more haunted but equally poignant “Aftersun” comes to mind). Even fewer have so elegantly literalized how the love that parents are able to share with their children — and vice versa — can be limited by their ability to express it. Almost none have more beautifully explored the role that making art, which is to speak without talking, can play in facilitating that process.

~this review continues on IndieWire~