This article originally appeared in the Playhouse Post newsletter.

Many people, when pressed to name their favorite Thanksgiving movie, head to the obvious and immediately give Planes, Trains, and Automobiles its due. No disrespect to John Hughes, but in recent years I’ve been partial to the poignant dark comedy Pieces of April, a gritty and insightful character study in which Katie Holmes scrambles around her New York City apartment building preparing for her estranged family to visit. Chaos ensues with a broken stove and neighbors that aren’t always super helpful. The anxiety of an imminent Thanksgiving meal – the anticipation of a reunion that the character may or may not actually want – drives the action throughout. And many audiences can relate.

Writer-director Peter Hedges’ debut (which screened in the Playhouse’s Thanksgiving-themed Mystery Movie slot this past week) crystallizes the appeal of messy family dramas around the holiday season. The universal complexities around spending time with relatives yields a very specific kind of escapism. After all, when you’re looking at someone else’s problems, it’s a great excuse to escape your own. 

This holiday season, the essential family drama comes from Norway. Joaquim Trier follows up his hipster-in-crisis crowdpleaser The Worst Person in the World with the Cannes-winning Sentimental Value, a touching and at times twisted look at the tension between successful filmmaker Gustav Borg (a first-rate Stellan Skarsgard) and his grown daughter Nora (Reinate Reinsve) as they confront their dark history. 

Gustav, who has a tendency to confuse his private and professional life, attempts to cast Nora in a film about her late mother; when she refuses, he turns instead to a glitzy American actress (Elle Fanning) to play the part instead. What ensues is a fascinating meta-mindgame between Gustav and Nora as the movie-within-a-movie forces them to work through their differences. It’s a touching cringe-comedy that builds toward emotional gratification from unexpected directions. 

Trier excels at this kind of subtle character study. From his bleak addiction drama Oslo, August 31st to his supernatural thriller Thelma, Trier and his co-writer Eskil Vogt burrow inside angry and alienated characters to find the empathy within. With Sentimental Value, they use the filmmaker-subject backdrop to explore a much larger theme: the complicated nature of a parent-child relationship, where both ends of that equation wind up as unreliable narrators. 

Gustav and Nora have different relationships to the past, why her mother is no longer around, and whether Gustav should have been more present in their life. At first, Nora doesn’t even want to consider the possibility that they could have a future together, and the movie’s title reads like a joke. But at the end of the day, everyone’s a little sentimental, and Trier digs deep to find it with even the most cynical people. 

I’ve appreciated Trier’s work for years (and once spent time with him on set for his first English-language movie, Louder Than Bombs). He’s a sharp, exacting filmmaker whose work takes somewhat familiar concepts and bends them into unfamiliar shapes. His characters are frisky troublemakers reminiscent of the iconoclasts that populated American cinema in the 1970s. Somehow, though, he guides them to warm and meaningful places without negating their isolated state. Trier doesn’t make holiday movies, but in his own way, his movies embody the holiday spirit.