Joachim Trier's Oslo: The Quiet Star of His Acclaimed New Film

In Joachim Trier’s films, Oslo is never just a backdrop. It’s a character. His latest, the Oscar-nominated 'Sentimental Value,' continues this tradition, weaving a story of a fractured family through the city’s distinct neighborhoods and moods. For Trier, the Norwegian capital is a place of intimate contradictions: both big and small, discreet yet dramatic, a city where fjord swims and ski slopes exist in the same metropolitan frame.

'It’s not as elegant as Stockholm, or as culturally vibrant as Copenhagen,' Trier admits. 'Oslo is more discreet.' That quality permeates the film. The story follows estranged filmmaker Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) and his daughters as they grapple with loss. Their inherited home, a soulful, deep-red cottage in the embassy-lined Frogner district, stands as a metaphor for the family itself—artistically prestigious from the outside, privately wounded.

The city’s spaces articulate the characters' inner lives. Daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve), a theater actor, lives in a sterile high-rise overlooking Our Savior’s Cemetery, a view chosen to underscore her isolation. Her professional world plays out at the venerable National Theater, a traditional institution Trier wanted to document 'from the inside.' In contrast, the city’s green spaces and nearby islands, accessible by a simple ferry ticket, offer fleeting escapes. A tense family negotiation happens in the dark, wooden booths of Lorry, a bohemian restaurant with a long literary history.

Even a key sequence at France's Deauville American Film Festival, where Gustav seeks a new star, reflects Trier’s eye for atmosphere. He chose its vast, flat beach for its 'existentialist' horizon, a stark contrast to crowded Cannes. Back in Oslo, the narrative reaches into the past at the national archives, a stunning, graphic maze of documents holding painful family secrets. Through it all, Oslo remains the constant—a discreet, compelling co-star in a film about memory and connection.