Sentimental Value / Affeksjonsverdi (2025) – Cinematography by Kasper Tuxen, DFF
“Sentimental Value / Affeksjonsverdi”
Spanish Title: Valor Sentimental
Year of Production: 2025
Director: Joachim Trier
Director of Photography: Kasper Tuxen Andersen, DFF
Lenses: Cooke 5/i
Film Stocks: Kodak 5203 50D, 5207 250D, 5217 200T, 5219 500T
Format and Aspect Ratio: 3-perf Super 35, 1.85:1
Other: 4K Digital Intermediate
Viewed on: DCP
35mm, Cooke 5/i lenses and Nordic light: Kasper Tuxen’s cinematography for Joachim Trier is intimate, honest and remarkably delicate.
The Film
Joachim Trier’s Nordic drama centers on a family made up of a father, played by Stellan Skarsgård, and his two daughters, played by Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. After the death of the mother, from whom the father had long been divorced, the three are brought back together after years of physical and emotional distance. The father is also a respected film director, although he has been absent from the big screen for some time. When he offers the lead role in his new screenplay — a personal project inspired by his own family — to his eldest daughter, she turns it down for deeply personal reasons. He nevertheless manages to move the production forward by casting a young Hollywood star, played by Elle Fanning.
This is Trier and his team’s next project after the celebrated “The Worst Person in the World” (2021). Here, the director moves more deeply into family wounds and the fraught territory of fathers and daughters, with a clear echo of the existential suffering found in Ingmar Bergman’s cinema. At the same time, the film-within-the-film structure becomes one of the central engines of the story. More complex than Trier’s previous film, beautifully staged and even better acted, “Sentimental Value” is an intimate and realistic study of family relationships. Its final turn may arrive a little abruptly, especially after the two hours that precede it, but the film remains one of the major titles of the season.
The Cinematographer
The cinematographer is Kasper Tuxen Andersen, DFF, one of Joachim Trier’s returning collaborators from “The Worst Person in the World” (2021), the film that truly brought him to wider international attention. He had already worked, however, with filmmakers such as Gus Van Sant on “The Sea of Trees” (2015), and on “The Professor and the Madman” (Farhad Safinia, 2019), starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn.
Tuxen also photographed “The Apprentice” (Ali Abbasi, 2024), centered on Donald Trump. Given his growing international profile, and his evident creative chemistry with Joachim Trier, Kasper Tuxen is likely to become an increasingly familiar name in cinephile and cinematography circles over the next few years.
Visual Style Analysis
Visually, “Sentimental Value” is built around 35mm texture, soft Nordic daylight, practical sources and a deliberately direct lighting concept that allows the domestic spaces and the actors’ faces to carry the emotional weight of the film.
As with Trier’s previous film, the filmmakers have chosen to shoot “Sentimental Value” in what feels like the only truly appropriate way for this material: on 35mm film, in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, with Cooke 5/i lenses, and with the occasional zoom appearing throughout the film. That choice is not merely nostalgic or decorative. With reasonable light levels and very fast lenses — these Cookes open to T1.4 — film remains a medium capable of producing images that feel realistic while also being kind to actors’ faces. It also brings, directly and without simulation, a photochemical texture that suits the film beautifully.
Trier and Tuxen’s aim — with Tuxen drawing inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky as well as from Nordic light — is clearly to make the lighting as direct and unforced as possible, allowing the internal drama to drive the film. This kind of cinematography is precisely what the story needs. What is being told is powerful, despite its apparent simplicity, because it is rooted in human behavior. It does not need an additional visual wrapper in order to function. In fact, almost any more imposed approach would probably have worked against it.
The only clear traces of stylization belong to the film’s flashbacks and to the film-within-the-film passages. These sections have a more pronounced worn-celluloid treatment than the rest of the picture. Without knowing exactly how they were produced, they sometimes feel as if they had gone through a more traditional photochemical printing process and had then been scanned from a final film print.
As in “The Worst Person in the World”, which is aesthetically close to this film, Tuxen frequently works with practical sources: lamps, wall fixtures and integrated lights that are placed at strategic points within the action and allowed to illuminate the actors for real. For this to work, Trier must clearly choreograph the action in the areas where Tuxen needs the light to function. In that sense, director and cinematographer seem to be working in complete alignment. The result is a series of simple but beautiful chiaroscuro effects. The characters are often surrounded by semi-darkness, with light appearing only in carefully chosen parts of the frame. This gives the film a deeply intimate atmosphere.
The day interiors are equally interesting. The northern light enters softly through the windows, often with little or no interior fill. Because the key source itself is so gentle, it wraps around the image and keeps the contrast soft and delicate. The shadows retain detail; they do not fall into dense, black areas. The effect is beautiful and often recalls the single-source lighting tradition associated with Vermeer, which has always translated particularly well to cinema.
In exteriors, the softness of Nordic light, even under full sun, allows the cinematography to retain delicate highlights and subtle detail. Some magic-hour moments are especially accomplished. There is also a clear effort to mark the different hours of the day throughout the film. This is not limited to exterior scenes. Interior sequences also suggest late afternoon, dawn, magic hour or the central part of the day with considerable precision.
There are also notable scenes set in the theater, both in the auditorium and backstage. These are among the more stylized moments in the film, along with the passages in which Trier and Tuxen seem to stage the action from the point of view of the house where much of the story unfolds. Those choices lead to some of the film’s most memorable images.
Conclusion
The overall result is very strong, particularly on a conceptual level, and at several points the film achieves outstanding images. Still, there are moments when the execution feels slightly less pure than Tuxen’s visual concept. He is capable of staging wide shots and general views with wonderful light, but in some close-ups there is a slight sense of over-modeling. It can feel as if, starting from a single source, the cinematographer has introduced a second one in order to soften the faces further, wrap the actors more carefully, fill them in, or simply make the image more polished and flattering.
Perhaps, in a film of this nature and with these ambitions, those close-ups did not need to be quite so refined. One sometimes senses Tuxen’s need to regain a little more control over the light. A slightly rawer, more direct, less worked-over approach might have served the material even better.
But this is a small reservation within a film that Trier shoots with great elegance. His visual strategy combines a very controlled handheld camera around the characters with a generally more descriptive Steadicam for spaces and environments. The film-within-the-film passages also contain some brilliant sequence shots. Above all, “Sentimental Value” stands out for its honesty, its direct way of filming and its simple Nordic lighting concept. That light contributes decisively to the film’s ability to reach the inner lives of the characters it portrays.
ON FILM & DIGITAL
© Ignacio Aguilar, 2026.
This article is part of ON FILM & DIGITAL’s English-language cinematography reviews and essays.
These texts are not plot summaries or general film reviews, but cinematography-focused essays written from the perspective of a working cinematographer.
The Author
Ignacio Aguilar is available for cinematography work, creative collaborations, lectures, workshops and international projects. He is a Sony Independent Certified Expert (ICE) and Cooke Optics Spanish Ambassador for Cooke SP3 lenses. Contact here.
