No More Heroes

Clara Cuccaro considers the “myth of resistance” in Joachim Trier’s newest film, “Sentimental Value.”

By Clara CuccaroNovember 28, 2025

• Film

• History

Among the many beliefs that I do not wish to part with is that houses retain the memory of everything that has happened inside them.
—Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, The Use of Photography (2005)

AT THE BEGINNING of Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg’s action-packed drama Max Manus: Man of War (2008), a group of young Norwegians gather in Nazi-occupied Oslo. A voice-over from the group’s titular leader (Aksel Hennie) vows to continue the fight “for king and country” by forming a resistance movement with his friends, whom he affectionately calls “the boys.” Rønning and Sandberg stage Manus’s exploits and undercover sabotage with the grammar of classical heroism, World War II, and the resistance struggle presented in the stark moral terms of good guys and bad guys.

Max Manus embodies what historian Tony Judt calls Europe’s “myth of […] resistance,” the comforting postwar fiction that most Western European nations stood united against the Germans; in reality, courage and complicity were often blurred. Judt notes that the immediate postwar decades were marked by a selective memory that erased collaboration from national narratives, instead emphasizing those noble myths that stabilized national identity and deferred moral reckoning. Resistance movements existed, but many only took off in the final years of the war, when Germany was nearing defeat.

The “resistance film” reinforces this vision, especially in France, where Charles de Gaulle’s provisional government sought political legitimacy and national pride after occupation. Early postwar films like René Clément’s La Bataille du rail (1946) and Le Père tranquille (1946) depicted ordinary citizens as selfless patriots, transforming wartime guilt into resilience. Marcel Ophuls’s documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) decisively challenged this myth, exposing everyday complicity through first-person interviews; it was banned from television— and wasn’t officially rereleased until 1981—for destroying, as network executive Jean-Jacques de Bresson put it, “myths that the people of France still need.”

The same cultural amnesia that shaped postwar France also occurred in Norway. After 1945, Norway framed the war as a moral struggle between freedom and Nazism, elevating heroic resisters like Max Manus while casting collaborators as morally corrupt. Since the 1990s, scholars such as Sigurd Sørlie have challenged this narrative, highlighting, for instance, the tragic fate of Norwegian Jews who were left unprotected. Yet Max Manus: Man of War perpetuates the comforting myth of national heroism. It is this homegrown combination of patriotism and cultural amnesia that Joachim Trier seeks to dismantle in his newest drama, Sentimental Value (2025).

On the surface, Sentimental Value is a portrait of a dysfunctional family, their ancestral home, and generational estrangement. Beneath these personal dynamics runs a subtle wartime narrative that complicates the myth of resistance: Gustav’s (Stellan Skarsgård) mother fought for the Norwegian resistance and was captured and tortured during the war, a history that shadows her descendants in quiet, corrosive ways. Throughout his career, Trier consistently explores rumination and memory, both individual and collective, and here, he incorporates the spirit of his grandfather, Erik Løchen—a filmmaker and resistance member—into Sentimental Value, imbuing the film’s resistance narrative with inherited trauma rather than mythic heroism.

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Trier introduces the Borg family during a period of transition. Sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) are confronted by Gustav, their estranged father, during their mother’s memorial service. Tensions rise and fall over coffee and finger sandwiches at the family’s homestead. Stage actress Nora is prickly around her absent-minded father, a famous director who laughs off every insult, while Agnes distracts herself from the madness by playing hostess. Trier and cinematographer Kasper Tuxen frame family members’ exasperation through a series of medium shots that emphasize their discomfort in close quarters. Trier restages the family gathering throughout the film in different settings, creating a cyclical pattern of conflict and reprieve.

Sentimental Value is stylistically aligned with the director’s self-proclaimed “Oslo trilogy”: as with Reprise (2006), Oslo, August 31st (2011), and The Worst Person in the World (2021), Trier and his frequent co-writer Eskil Vogt nestle their newest film within the contemporary rhythms of the Norwegian capital. Oslo is Trier and Vogt’s playground, where themes of absent parents, fraught sibling dynamics, and haunted family homes collect and combust in their episodic narratives; flashbacks, temporal leaps, and voice-overs help structure the storytelling. These temporal motifs function like rabbit holes, disrupting a conventional three-act chronology and immersing the viewer in the fragmented memories of the self-absorbed characters. Trier keeps his audience guessing with moody vignettes that oscillate between melancholy and exuberance. Worst Person, for instance, unfolds across 12 titled chapters, among them “Chapter 3: Oral Sex in the Age of #MeToo” and “Chapter 11: Positive”

The Borg ancestral home sits at the center of the film’s many segments. The facade is reminiscent of the Ekdahl mansion in Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), but the inside has been whitewashed by Gustav and his ex-wife Sissel (Ida Marianne Vassbotn Klasson). Their contemporary Alvar Aalto, together with IKEA furnishings, aims to neutralize the space from bad memories, but skeletons remain despite these renovations. One piece of furniture that has stood the test of time is a wood-burning stove that links the house’s two levels. As a child, Nora used the vents on the stove as a makeshift intercom to eavesdrop on her parents’ fights. She shows the stove to her nephew Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven) during her mother’s memorial service, only to hear her father’s voice from downstairs. Nora tries to remain cool during her initial interactions with her father, but, through Reinsve’s mounting unease and guarded body language, it is clear she resents his unannounced appearance and is triggered by memories of her parents’ arguments.

The idea that the home plays witness to joy and trauma over generations is nothing novel, but it is poignant. In Nora’s childhood letter to her house at the beginning of the film, she imagines that the walls are capable of feeling, of remembering who once lived within them. In Sentimental Value, the house becomes a living metaphor for the Borg family, every crack felt by Gustav, Nora, and Agnes, with some characters carrying the weight of their ancestors better than others.

Trier homes in on Gustav’s trauma with two remarkable flashbacks narrated by Norwegian actress Bente Børsum. Karin (Vilde Søyland), Gustav’s mother, is first shown using the same stove as Nora; we do not know yet that she was a resistance fighter. Unlike Max Manus, who is shown shooting Nazis in the center of Oslo, Karin only appears from the perspective of her sister, Edith (Mari Strand Ferstad). Edith watches Karin get carted off by the Germans, who imprison and torture her for two years. Karin’s subsequent depression and alienation after the war leads to her death by suicide in the ancestral home. A seven-year-old Gustav discovers her body, and this loss reverberates through the entire family, leaving a lingering trauma that Gustav carries alongside his aunt. Karin’s story contrasts with most postwar resistance films where acts of courage are celebrated. Her experience reveals the hidden toll of survival and the intergenerational scars it leaves on the Borg family.

Edith channels her grief and anger into rebellion. During a flashback to the 1960s, the family home is festive for the first time, filled with sex, drugs, and music, which Edith, in a Twiggy-esque outfit, turns up. But her need for speed is fueled by resentment: she “was sure her neighbors had ratted on her sister,” and as a result, Edith made sure they would never forget her family’s presence.

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The story of Sentimental Value was partially inspired by Trier’s grandfather, Løchen, a resistance fighter during the war. According to the director, “He was in a work camp and barely survived, and he never slept a good night’s sleep for the rest of his life.” Løchen was a postwar jazz musician who turned towards experimental filmmaking. His film Jakten (1959) coincided with the French New Wave at Cannes. In Sentimental Value, art, rather than heroic pride or armed resistance, serves as an act of rebellion and a coping mechanism. Work in the performing arts allows Gustav and Nora to deal with the trauma of their family history, just as Trier’s grandfather relied on filmmaking to endure the aftermath of the war.

The link between grief and artistic expression is most evident in Gustav, a foreboding, absent father burdened by age and a failing memory. Gustav has always channeled his demons into filmmaking. At a retrospective of his work in Deauville, France, a clip from his World War II film starring a young Agnes lays bare his obsessions: she flees the Nazis, leaving her brother behind, and the story ends on a suspenseful cliff-hanger with a close-up on Agnes’s haunting blue eyes.

Trier stages Gustav as an imposing colossus past his prime. Skarsgård’s tall stature and intense aura has led to his being typecast as a villain, but here, the actor channels that menace into vulnerability, giving Gustav a presence that is both commanding and emotionally fraught. There are no heroes in this film, only survivors who can never escape their past, linking Gustav’s work to the spirit of his mother and his impulse to rewrite history through the lens of tragedy rather than heroism.

Still, Gustav’s daughters cannot see him as we do: in a scene on the beaches of Deauville, Trier frames the artist Gustav as the man from Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, mysterious and contemplative, staring off into the abyss. His attempts at reconciliation with his daughters are awkward and tinged with macho defense mechanisms. Nora flat-out rejects his offer to star in his upcoming film, because he approaches her with such rude disinterest. She has no idea that his newest film is about his mother, and how would she?

Like her father, Nora’s talent and anger are her defining traits. She makes a splash during a backstage meltdown at the Oslo National Theatre. Rather than leaning into melodrama, Trier and Reinsve ham up the scene with some slapstick comedy. The camera circles Reinsve from every angle as she dry heaves and tries to rip off her costume, amplifying the absurdity of her panic until she finally summons the nerve to deliver her lines with calculated ferocity onstage. Trier focuses on Nora at rehearsals, effortfully preparing the given circumstances for a play, through slow zoom shots that underscore her intensity. These glimpses show that Nora, like her father, would rather retreat into a fictional world than repair her personal relationships.

This is the second Trier heroine Reinsve has inhabited in just five years. In The Worst Person in the World, Reinsve plays Julie, the Platonic ideal of a millennial: relatable, magnetic, perpetually fumbling through jobs, always running (for whatever reason). Nora maintains Julie’s spark, but she’s far more serious, bearing the full brunt of her family trauma. Reinsve leans into the highs and lows of Nora’s depression, portraying a woman whose talent verges on self-destruction both on- and offstage, with bipolar episodes that leave her immobilized. Acting can’t save Nora from existential melancholy, and Gustav confirms this ancestral pattern, telling Nora, during an argument, “I recognize myself in you.” He only deepens the wound when he drunkenly calls to apologize. “I’m sensitive,” he explains. “We’re both so alike.” Becoming her father is Nora’s worst nightmare, so she ends the play’s run early and retreats to her apartment.

Nora’s struggles echo the unpictured depression of her grandmother Karin and father Gustav, neither of whom can openly express their pain. Trier traces this generational silence to the National Archives of Norway, a maze of paperwork with incessant corridors and fluorescent light that punctuates the film, as does the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum coda sequence in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023). The camera glides through reading rooms and rows of file boxes like a ghost, making history both tangible and endless.

It’s here that Agnes uncovers a witness report titled “The Torture of Karin Ingris.” Trier lingers on the document with clerical precision, pairing its bureaucratic detachment with stark images of Nazi brutality. Karin, who never spoke of her ordeal, provides a dry, unemotional witness report that highlights the weight of history: it is the language of a survivor numbed by time. Karin’s emotional vacancy leaves no room for heroism or noble posturing. Reading her grandmother’s testimony moves Agnes to tears, giving her a glimpse into the buried pain that has shaped her family.

Until this moment, the character of Agnes has been relegated to the peripheries of the story. As a historian, wife, and mother, she lives a life far more levelheaded than that of her father and sister. After famous American actress Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) drops out of Gustav’s project, in what feels like the film’s most overproduced segment, Agnes gets to work. She knows neither Gustav nor Nora can communicate directly, but she, miraculously, can reach both of them, sensing that artistic work is their common language. In this way, Agnes assumes the role of Trier himself, quietly orchestrating the conditions for catharsis that the artists cannot create on their own. Through her guidance, Gustav and Nora finally connect through making art, and the film concludes not in tragedy but in the quiet, hard-won depth of feeling that gives the story its namesake.