“It’s hard to love someone without mercy.”

Sitting across the dinner table from his actress daughter after sweeping back into her life with a high-concept plan for reconciliation, acclaimed filmmaker and absent father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) offers that wisdom to Nora (Renate Reinsve) as if directing her on how to forgive him. And in the wake of his ex-wife’s death, that’s precisely what Gustav intends to do — not by apologizing for his decision to leave their family when Nora was still just a child, but rather by casting her in an autobiographical Netflix drama about his own life.

Exploitative as that sounds, Gustav isn’t just hoping to make Nora say the words he’s always longed to hear from his firstborn daughter in exchange for a cut of Ted Sarandos’ money. On the contrary, his plan — like everything else in the transcendently moving “Sentimental Value,...