Sentimental Value evinces a strong understanding of how trauma lingers. Directed by Joachim Trier (and written with his regular collaborator Eskil Vogt), the drama is about a family, including where they live and how they live. The patriarch of the clan is a film director (Stellan Skarsgård) straining to keep his career going in a time where actual art is financed only reluctantly. He’s also trying to mend relationships with his two daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve), an actress, and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who now stays far away from showbiz after a childhood that included a stint with her father’s camera trained on her. Years of painful memories hang around these characters like a dense fog, preventing them from seeing each other well enough to achieve the understanding they clearly long for. To map this fraught landscape, Trier uses every cinematic tool he can muster: visual metaphors, careful staging within the frame, metafictional conceits, edits that leap between decades. Despite a lead character who works as a director and a few sharp blows delivered against the industry, Sentimental Value is not really a film about filmmaking, but it does clearly draw great pleasure and satisfaction from all that the form offers. That sensation extends to giving screen actors the space to render a panoply of feelings. No one responds to that opportunity as magnificently as Trier’s recurring star Reinsve. She plays the totality of her character in every last moment. Within the film’s thesis, that totality includes hints of the cracks that ran through her forebears’ very souls. Her performance manages the feat of being massive and intimate at the same time.