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Few films this decade have managed to capture the millennial experience quite like Joachim Trier's 2021 The Worst Person in the World. The Norwegian film follows Julie (Renate Reinsve) a 30-something-year-old from Oslo who flits from boyfriend to boyfriend, trying on new, but unsatisfying personalities for size with each relationship. Reinsve's captivating, delicate performance spoke to millennial women everywhere, tapping straight into a generational unease: who are we meant to be? And why are we so lonely? Indeed, the film became something of a viral hit, with Reinsve's frozen in time running scene coming to symbolise a uniquely millennial identity crisis.
Five years later and Trier and Reinsve have done it again. Trier's new film, Sentimental Value, which also stars Reinsve, captures another facet of the millennial experience – a facet that just so happens to be a major talking point for young women this year. I am talking, of course, about the pain and pressure of being the eldest daughter – and, more specifically, the unravelling and, hopefully, the healing that can occur when an eldest daughter reaches adulthood.
The 'eldest daughter' concept is a fairly new concept amongst millennials, but in the past few months, it's been quickly picking up traction on social media. One podcast host says “Eldest Daughter Syndrome,” as an “undiagnosed term” to describe how many eldest daughters “feel like you have to be the rock – like you have to go through everything, make sure that everything looks fine. You want to fix everything… you become a second parent to your younger siblings, whether you like it or not.” Another viral video claims “eldest daughter energy hits different.” It then lists some symptoms: “Professional overthinker since age 8. Was told ‘you’re so mature for your age' a little too often,” and so on. It concludes, “Healing from being the strong one for too long.” Then there are the countless viral videos calling out “eldest daughter core” in their favourite characters.
And a few artists have picked up on the eldest daughter conversation, too. Take Taylor Swift, whose song “Eldest Daughter” from her latest album includes the lyric “Every eldest daughter / Was the first lamb to the slaughter.” There's also singer Gatlin whose 2025 album is titled The Eldest Daughter and singer Alex Apolline who released her EP Tales of an Eldest Daughter last year.
“Now in their twenties, thirties and beyond, eldest daughters are discovering this [concept] now,” Apolline tells me. “Finally we have the brain space to retrospect and realising there’s a whole lot of suppressed emotion and self-expression that there was never quite room for. It’s never been spoken about so explicitly before. We were all too busy trying to be everything for everyone else.”
The big question adult eldest daughters are now facing, after years of focusing on others, is, she says: “Who am I if I’m not making other people happy?”
And it's this existential question that Sentimental Value manages to explore so brilliantly.
Reinsve plays Nora, a 30-something Norwegian actor. When we meet her, she is, to put it bluntly, an eldest daughter on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Moments from the opening night of a play, she spirals into a panic attack. She refuses to leave her dressing room. She tears open her costume corset. She drags a co-star into the wings for a manic makeout session. She's erratic, emotional, literally bursting at the seams. But somehow, after being duct taped back into her costume and pushed on stage, she pulls herself together and delivers a miraculous performance.
Perhaps it won't surprise you to learn that Nora and her younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) didn't have the healthiest of childhoods. After years of hearing muffled fights echoing through the walls of their home, the girls watched as their father packed his bags and left them and their mother behind. It's telling that an ominous, telling black crack stretches up the wall of their family home.
At the beginning of the film, the now-adult sisters reconnect with their father, Gustav (Stellan Skårsgard) following their mother's death. He wants to mend the cracks in their relationship. A famous arthouse film director, he extends an olive branch to Nora in the form of a role – a role inspired by his own mother. When Nora refuses, he casts American star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) in her place. And so begins a quiet family tale, as the father and daughters attempt the painful, jolting process of untangling and smoothing over the thorny mess of their decades-old wounds.
One of the thorniest parts of it all comes down to Gustav's apparent inability to understand why his eldest daughter can't seem to get her life together, while Agnes, his youngest, is seemingly happy and settled. It is, of course, simply because she was the eldest daughter, in the millennial understanding of the phrase.
One moment of honesty between the two sisters captures it beautifully.
'This film allows us to really understand what a privilege it is to get to grow old at all.'
“How did it happen? You turned out fine, and I became up fucked up,” Nora asks her sister. “Why didn't our childhood ruin you? You have a child, a home, a family.”
“There's one major difference in the way we grew up," Agnes says wisely. “I had you. I know you think you're incapable of caring. But you were there. When mum was down. You washed my hair. Combed it. Got me to school. I felt safe."
Few stories manage to capture the discombobulating aftershocks of growing up as an eldest daughter quite like Sentimental Value. For eldest daughter Nora, life as an adult means learning how to tape herself back together and get back on stage – to live on despite the crack in her foundations.
Sentimental Value is in cinemas now.
