Directed bu Joachim Trier | Written by Trier and Eskil Vogt | 133 min | ▲▲▲▲▲ 

An earlier version of this review appeared on FITI during coverage of the Atlantic International Film Festival

A second time watching Sentimental Value, away from the subcutaneous hum of the festival season, confirms what I suspected about the film on first watch. It’s a masterpiece, which isn’t a term I toss around with any regularity.

I was a fan of Trier’s The Worst Person In The World, one of the most awkward romantic comedies ever, especially of its star, Renate Reinsve, but this is something else entirely. Reinsve is the heart of this new film, giving a fantastic performance as Nora Borg, a renowned but anxious theatre actor. She’s estranged from her filmmaker father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard), who is back in her life with a new project he’d like her to act in. She turns him down flat, so he engages an American star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), to play the role. Then there’s Nora’s sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who has a husband and nine-year-old son and is only slightly more accommodating of their father’s reemergence.

There’s so much going on in the film, and it does everything well that it’s trying to do. It starts as an ode to this beautiful Oslo home and touches upon the lives of the inhabitants over time with a voiceover that feels like it’s wandered in from some Nordic cultural documentary, and it immediately overcomes my distrust of v/o as a screenwriter crutch — it just works.

Then there’s the gorgeous score from Hania Rani, and the perfect choice of the Terry Callier song, “Dancing Girl,” to set the tone. There’s the beautifully austere interiors, the touches of nordic design in the windows and light fixtures. There’s the perfectly gauged flashbacks that don’t linger long, just enough to connect the thread of generational trauma. And the meta layer of a film about a filmmaker and his daughter the actor, scenes playing out, a film (or play) within a film.

But mostly it’s the incredible script brought to life by career performances, a complex family drama that never tilts into melodrama. Fanning is excellent here, but she’s a distant fourth to the central triad:

The master, Stellan Skarsgard, playing a man who’s had a lot of success, but is a bit of a bully, and is finally starting to own his mistakes and doing his level best, even as he can’t really talk about it, to mend them. There’s a terrific gag right in the middle where he gives his grandson a couple of completely inappropriate DVDs for his birthday in the hope of turning him into a cinephile, never even checking whether the family has a player.

Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, the younger, “normal” sister, who has the less flashy role, never puts a foot wrong as she has to manage both her father’s pushiness and her sister’s struggles with mental health, and who does her own research into her family history and what could still be lingering between all of them.

And Reinsve, whose face says everything when she, like her father, cannot. She’s so good, especially in the scenes with Skarsgard. They have almost uncomfortable chemistry — witness a scene where they both have a cigarette outside that wonderful house. I look forward to seeing Sentimental Value a third time.