I watched Sentimental Value on one of the first nights of the new year, in a small, crowded Berlin cinema, grateful for some time by myself after days of family gatherings and never-ending holiday childcare. Family is the one thing everyone keeps running from—whether it’s the trauma of childhood or the domestic stability one is failing to maintain as a fully-formed adult.

Renate Reinsve’s thirty-something character Nora knows this too well. She is caught in perpetual flight, propelled by an existential discomfort that is both generic—loneliness, childlessness, restlessness—and specific to the film’s plot: grief for her recently departed mother; insecurity about her talent as an actress; unresolved conflict with her absent filmmaker father, who suddenly reappears to offer her the leading role in a film he says he’s written only for her.

Layered, oh-so-relatable, even charming in its display of suffering: that’s the lure of the film, which on paper offers diverse, plausible, and pleasurable access points for many, many viewers.

So why, after the screening ended, was I walking home at a furious speed, enraged for the two hours lost in the theater?

New mothers are particularly protective of their leisure time, and I am a cinephile new mother, so you can imagine my anger. Or perhaps you cannot, because audiences around the world loved Joachim Trier’s sixth feature: a runner-up to the highest-grossing Norwegian film of all time, nearly tripling its production budget, already a Cannes winner and now nominated for nine Oscars. Alas, the validation of establishment-abiding prizes has not yet ceased to exercise its influence, just as Nora needs the approval of her bad-dad-great-artist to overcome stage fright and find herself anew.

A Well-Marketed Superficiality

As my steps quickened, snow was covering Neukölln’s dirty streets. The film’s wholesome aesthetic had invaded the world around me, to the only effect that my Scandi-skepticism had peaked by the time I checked my algorithm. In promotional posts for the film, comments by Letterboxd’s users were used in lieu of press quotes, hinting at the universal appeal of the story. Joachim Trier was labeled as “the king of mid-layers” on the popular Instagram account Director Fits. Freud intensified. All this left me missing the other Trier.

The problem wasn’t that I had gone to the cinema already knowing that the protagonist would wear a particular coat in a particular dramatic sequence. Nor that the promise haunting my screening—I would emotionally connect with at least one string of an intricate emotional drama—remained ingloriously unfulfilled. (Dry eyes throughout. Except when yawning, that is.) The problem is that I felt duped by a director who has successfully marketed slickness as depth, and emotional cliché as artistic accomplishment.

I hate to break it to you, fans, but Sentimental Value is a fraud. Yet the film’s canny marketing isn’t the culprit; after all, it only does its job. What the film itself fails to realize—if you strip away its skilled framing, the spotless art direction, the magnificent performances—is the greatness and depth it postulates. It is not unbearable, such imposture, on the contrary it is quite beautiful to look at. Taking a step back from the current laudation, however, it becomes evident that it does not “sink into” you, as the anticipated sobbing leads one to believe—it levitates above you, hovering in the fog of superficiality, repetition, and predictability.