NEW YORK (OSV News) – “I need a Xanax!” declares a victim-in-waiting in the bloodsoaked slasher flick “The Strangers – Chapter 3” (Lionsgate). Moviegoers unwise enough to patronize the film may end up echoing that sentiment.

By turns sadistic and stupid, this wrap-up concludes the story of Maya (Madelaine Petsch), the protagonist of the series, and the masked killers who have been chasing her since the 2024 reboot of a horror franchise that dates back to 2008. Although her face may not be hidden, Maya’s identity is as sketchily established as those of her seemingly motiveless stalkers.

Having slain one of her pursuers at the end of the last installment, Maya is eventually recruited by the group’s leader as a potential replacement for her would-be murderer. The notion underlying this plot development seems to be that anyone is capable of becoming a dab hand at disemboweling. Call it the Bob Ross approach to grisly slaughter.

Toward the beginning of the movie, a church with a scary crucifix is used as a neutral setting, a sort of sanctuary, and there are vague ruminations on religion. These are too inconsequential, however, to do more than irk Christian believers.

At the other end of the running time, the returning filmmakers — director Renny Harlin and screenwriters Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland — dabble in ridiculously unrealistic psychology amid the predation.

They somehow end up mixing absurdly ill-motivated momentary eroticism with the ongoing mayhem, all to the tune of the Moody Blues’ classic song “Nights in White Satin.” Rest assured, your eyes won’t be missing any beauty at all if you prudently choose to steer clear of this senseless dud.

The film contains excessive gory violence, at least one mild oath and several rough terms. The OSV News classification is O — morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

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Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” is nominated for an impressive nine Academy Awards, among them the first best picture nod for a Norwegian film and the auteur himself for both directing and co-writing (with longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt) the family drama’s original screenplay.

But perhaps the film’s most remarkable achievement, Oscar-wise, is four first-time acting nominations.

Renate Reinsve, the director’s muse from his acclaimed feature “The Worst Person in the World,” is a lead actress nominee for playing popular but troubled Oslo stage and TV actor Nora Borg.

Sweden’s Stellan Skarsgård — whose career has run the gamut from Lars von Trier’s arty provocations to Marvel, “Dune,” “Star Wars” and “Mamma Mia!” franchise entries — is, at 74, arguably leading the supporting actor race. He plays Nora’s long-absent father Gustav, a once-respected writer-director trying to revive his career with a semiautobiographical project he needs his daughter to star in — and she wants nothing to do with.

Norwegian Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and American Elle Fanning both have supporting actress nods for, respectively, Nora’s younger, more conciliatory sister Agnes and the Hollywood star Rachel Kemp, who yearns for artistic cred and could definitely be the replacement casting that gets Gustav’s movie financed — if she can handle its very Scandinavian main role.

But while suicide, wartime atrocities and intimate betrayals haunt the picturesque Borg family home, Trier does not take “Sentimental Value” into obvious Bergman territory. The four principals’ unmet personal and professional needs play out in unpredictable, funny and warm — as well as shattering — ways.

Though both dressed in black when they spoke with The Envelope at the Four Seasons Los Angeles recently, Trier and Skarsgård exhibited high spirits and fond camaraderie while examining the mysteries of relationships and art.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Stellan Skarsgård, center, with Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in “Sentimental Value.”

(Kasper Tuxen Andersen / Neon)

You guys really seem to enjoy all the awards–season hoopla.

Trier: We’ve become such good friends, it’s like we really love each other. We made this film about a terribly dysfunctional family, but we are actually quite functional!

The whole gang looked so excited watching the nomination announcements on that viral video.

Skarsgård: I was most happy that Elle and Inga got nominations. I’ve lived my whole life without a nomination — not a problem! — and you know that Renate will get a couple of Oscars, probably, in the near future. So it was beautiful.

For me, it’s the highest award in the world for a film actor. I do appreciate it, but it doesn’t mean much professionally.

Especially for you, who’s done just about everything a film actor can. Gustav seems like a special role, though.

Skarsgård: It is one of the best roles I’ve gotten in my life, but not on paper. It’s with Joachim directing it. He is interested in whatever nonverbal reaction you have between the lines. That is the acting I like, that kind of attention to the details of the psychological narrative that is not the normal film narrative.

Did you gain new insights into the plight of aging film workers?

Skarsgård: [grinning] Well, I’m in the beginning of my career still.

Tell Stellan why you wrote Gustav for him, Joachim.

Trier: You’ve worked with Spielberg and Fincher and all of these great directors. I wanted to offer you a proper drama role where you can also be very vulnerable and honest about who you are. It’s not your biographical story at all — you have very good relationships to your kids and this man doesn’t — but you really brought your heart to it and made him somehow a human being in the three-dimensional sense. And I think your colleagues recognized that.

“When you see him directing, you see that he has the sensibility and psychological intelligence of a good director,” Skarsgård, left, says of his character, Gustav Borg. “It’s very common that those directors are not very good with their family life.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

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Since a stroke damaged his short-term memory, Stellan receives prompts through an earpiece on set. How was it to work with that?

Trier: I witnessed a process that moved me deeply, and I think it’s made this film better. First, we decided to make Stellan’s prompter [Vibeke Brathagen, a prompter at Oslo’s National Theatre, where a number of “Value’s” scenes were filmed] part of the ensemble. To see an artist of this caliber in such a vulnerable position of trying something new coincided with portraying a character at a turning point in his life. Both the character and Stellan are working this deep feeling of, can I go on? Will there be another chance for me?

Skarsgård: It’s permanent, I can’t remember lines. What worried me was not only the language, but I had problems with the thought that goes over several beats. So I have to talk shorter and more in pulses. And it’s hard work because it’s not just somebody prompting and you repeat it, but rhythm between the actors is very important. To keep that rhythm, the prompter has to talk over the other actor’s lines. So you’re hearing two lines at the same time but you only react to one.

How was working with Renate?

Trier: She’s like a force of nature. We don’t know how she does what she does. We did one day of rehearsals and Stellan came up and gave me a hug [and] said, “Who is this person? She’s incredible!”

Skarsgård: I remember that! Her face is transparent; you can see every feeling. She’s natural and curious and has a musicality that’s wonderful. I’m talking about rhythm again, of our scenes together. It was really good fun.

Inga?

Trier: One of the biggest challenges of this film was finding someone to play Renate’s younger sister who could match her level of performance, looked like her and spoke Norwegian fluently. There’s not an endless pool of those, but we did see around 200 people. When Inga arrived, it was very clear. There is an authenticity, a groundedness and something unneurotic and unproblematic about her approach. The earnestness transferred into the character and lifted it. She’s escaped the mad circus of the Borg family in a way — said, “I want my own family.”

And Elle?

Trier: I really wanted to work with Elle for her skills and craft, but she’s also grown up in the Hollywood system. She could portray this person yearning to connect with something deeper as an actor.

She offered a lot of nuanced, different takes. There’s a scene where Rachel’s reading a text and crying in front of Gustav. It’s good acting, but there’s some sense that she’s acting stylistically, different than how he wants. Elle did several versions of that so we could find the right tone. She’s like a super-sophisticated jazz musician.

Saying the house is like a character too sounds a bit lame. But you really did some amazing things with the place, up to and including copying its interiors on a soundstage — which, despite his desire to shoot in his ancestral home, is ultimately where Gustav makes his film within the film.

Trier: I’ve been very aware that this film is about generational trauma and the house witnessing the 20th century. It’s subtly there. I’m not making a huge point of it. But for me that mattered when making the film. The thing is, how do these things percolate three, four generations later? I’ve felt that, and I know a lot of people have, and those conversations matter.

I wouldn’t use the word “device,” but the house gives us a more poetic approach to how quick time moves. The house has witnessed what the family can’t speak about. What Gustav’s mother went through. What he has felt but doesn’t know how to articulate. How it’s affected him toward his daughters. How they are choosing or not choosing to have a family. It’s connected through the gaze of the house.

So how to make that interesting and cinematic? I had a wonderful production design department, and our cinematographer, Kasper Tuxen, built a replica of the house on a soundstage. We went between that and the real house, and we did every 10 years of the 20th century with different lenses, different film stocks, different production design. It’s a love letter to cinema, also. It gave us an opportunity to nerd out and say, “We’re in the ’20s and ’30s, now we’re in the ’60s” and really play with the form.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Though he’s a master manipulator, Gustav always has to compromise to get a semblance of what he wants. Guess that’s directing in a nutshell, huh?

Trier: That’s the drama. How far do you have to be pragmatic without losing your art and still sustaining your career? All people in this business have to make tough choices at times. I could project my nightmares through him. What if I had been that person who didn’t spend time with my family? What if I had to compromise?

Skarsgård: There’s a lot of things out of Gustav’s control. He can’t manipulate his family enough; he’s trying, he brings out all the tools — be funny, be nice, everything — but he doesn’t reach them, and it’s tragic. When you see him directing, you see that he has the sensibility and psychological intelligence of a good director. It’s very common that those directors are not very good with their family life.

Speaking of compromises, the specter of Netflix hangs over Gustav’s whole project.

Trier: Someone asked me if this is a critique. No, it’s an encouragement [chuckles]. I mean, wouldn’t it be wonderful if a lot of the great films Netflix does were shown in theaters first?

You concluded your Golden Globes acceptance speech, Stellan, saying “Cinema should be seen in cinemas.”

Skarsgård: One of the great things with cinema is it can touch on all the things that are inexplicable, that you cannot say in words. The narrative form of television is based on you not watching. It explains everything through dialogue so you can make pancakes at the same time. But cinema is the only place where you can do those silent things.

“Sentimental Value” says so much with wordless glances and still faces.

Trier: Now we’re speaking about Stellan’s character. That silent space, where words don’t work for that character and the trauma which can never be quite articulated, is also connected to the silent space where we hope that art can be created. It’s a bit of a yin and yang, but there’s something about the traumatic and the sublime that’s connected in the world. I see it all the time. I’ve spent my whole life hanging out with creative, wonderful people, and in ways that they can’t explain, you feel that you’re working through something. It might never be resolved, but you’re using what you can, you’re telling what you can.

To end on the wonderful Joan Didion quote — a writer we all adore, of course — “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It’s a mystery to me, but the film is certainly trying to deal with that somehow.

(Christina House / For The Times)

When people talk about an actor with range, they usually mean the wide variety of roles they can play. De Niro going from Travis Bickle to Jake LaMotta. Brando going from On the Waterfront to Guys and Dolls. Pacino playing both Michael Corleone and Tony Montana, two gangsters with diametrically opposed approaches to criminality.

The same holds true for Robert Duvall, a tremendous screen actor who died on Monday at the age of 95, and whose credits — over 150 in a career spanning six decades — include everything from a Texas Ranger (Lonesome Dove) to a Texas outlaw (True Grit); a sinister TV boss (Network) to an enlightened L.A. cop (Colors); an ex-con pulling off one last job (The Outfit) to an aging rancher protecting his land (Open Range); a conniving sports journalist (The Natural) to an editor-in-chief seeking redemption (The Paper) to a Soviet dictator (Stalin).

There are a hundred other examples in Duvall’s vast filmography, which lasted all the way till he was over 90, when he held his final roles as a seasoned practitioner of black magic (The Pale Blue Eye) and the owner of the Philadelphia 76ers (Hustle). Like many actors who hailed from a generation trained under the Method — in Duvall’s case, with the legendary Sanford Meisner — and who cut their chops in the burgeoning years of television, Duvall was extremely prolific and willing to try out any part at least once.

But he had a gift few performers have ever showcased to such an extent: a range that not only spread horizontally, shifting through characters across the board, but vertically, allowing him to be a big, bellowing, destructive man in one movie, and then a small, discreet, vulnerable one in the next. This extreme pendulum of human temperament meant Duvall could go from boiling hot to ice cold within a single film or even a single scene. It helped him to fully embody people at either end of the spectrum, in a series of iconic roles that made him one of the greatest.

Let’s start with the famous ones: For The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola always wanted Duvall to play the soft-spoken Corleone consigliere Tom Hagen. In the director’s previous feature, The Rain People, the actor was terrifying as a nutso highway patrolman who tries to rape the film’s heroine. It was the polar opposite of Hagen, but Coppola knew Duvall had the range for both parts.

What makes the actor so formidable in The Godfather is how Hagen always sits in the shadows, serving as both strategic advisor and silent moral compass to a corrupt family. An adopted son to Don Corleone, and therefore not a blood brother, Tom Hagen is a perpetual outsider who at one point becomes the Don himself. This happens during a memorable scene between Duvall and Pacino in The Godfather: Part II, after the Corleone’s Lake Tahoe compound gets ambushed. Duvall plays a man of few words, so when he looks at Pacino and says, “I always wanted to be thought of as a brother by you, Mike. A real brother,” it carries the weight of the world, and tons of contained emotion.

In another Coppola classic, Apocalypse Now, Duvall portrayed a man of many words that have turned into some of the most famous lines in film history. To embody the surf-obsessed and fearless Colonel Kilgore, the actor delved into his own past in the military, first as the son of a Rear Admiral in the navy and later as a private first class in the army, which he ditched to study acting in New York.

Duvall did plenty of research to build the Kilgore character, basing his performance on officers he served under at Fort Bragg and choosing a cowboy hat to mimic how members of the air calvary in Vietnam sometimes wore mementos from the American West. But it’s the actor’s delivery that everyone remembers, brilliantly going from hot to cold as he lambasts his troops during a bombing campaign, then kneels beside them to calmly state: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” — a sinister line considering the mass death happening all around them, but also perfectly true to character.

The same year Apocalypse Now was released, Duvall played another bigger-than-life military man in The Great Santini, which was shot after the Coppola film and feels at times like a spinoff story for Colonel Kilgore. As the titular antihero and contender for worst screen father of 1979, Duvall embodied a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Marines who settles with his family near a base in South Carolina, where he conducts training sessions and rules over his four children like he’s about to send them off to battle.

There are some classic Duvallian moments in The Great Santini, a movie I recall well because it was one of my dad’s favorites (don’t ask). In the opening scene, Santini — whose real name is “Bull” Meechum — gets wasted at an officer’s dance and fake vomits Campbell’s Soup all over the floor, then has his platoon lick it up in front of all the horrified guests. In what’s probably the film’s highlight, the Colonel plays a long one-on-one basketball game against his oldest son (Michael O’Keefe) that turns so violently competitive, he nearly takes his kid’s head off.

Like Kilgore, Meechum is a professional soldier and all-around tyrant with a voice that resounds like a bullhorn. But Duvall also reveals his weaknesses at key moments, showing how he actually tries hard as a father yet can’t help confusing training soldiers with rearing his own children.

Weakness also characterizes the role that earned Duvall his only Oscar for best actor. As the broken country singer Mac Sledge in Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies, he became so small on screen that his character almost disappeared amid the Texas flatlands where he washes up after another catastrophic drinking binge. Ditching alcohol and a successful music career to stay on as a handyman at a roadside motel run by a beautiful widow (Tess Harper), Sledge hardly utters a word for the first half of the movie. When he finally speaks, and eventually sings again, it’s with utter grace and sincerity. Duvall was perhaps never better than as a severely wounded man who finds enough inner strength to restart his life, letting go of the two things he loves — music and whiskey — to last another day.

Fans of the star surely have other characters to add to the list, whether big or small or some of both. (I have to confess that I’ve never seen his famous performance in Lonesome Dove, which aired on CBS when I was 12 and earned the actor a Golden Globe.) In his later years, Duvall seemed to say yes to anything, from solid A-list dramas like The Road and Crazy Heart to blockbusters like Gone in 60 Seconds, Deep Impact, The 6th Day and Jack Reacher.

He played it big again one last time in The Apostle, a role he was born to inhabit — and ingeniously did so at the ripe age of 66, in a movie he also wrote and directed. As a Pentecostal preacher with major anger issues, causing him to kill his wife’s lover with a baseball bat at…a Little League game, Duvall portrayed a character who was like an aggregate of all the men he’d played before — flawed and crazy men with good hearts, men who meant well but had a terrible way of demonstrating it. Using his roaring baritone as both a weapon and a healing device, he ultimately gets under our skin in a series of fiery sermons he delivers like monologues accumulated throughout his long career.

Duvall’s brilliance was not only in his versatility, but in the way he could make larger-than-life men like the preacher or Kilgore suddenly seem tiny, undercutting their belligerence with vulnerability or tenderness. And he could make tiny men like Mac Sledge or Tom Hagen stand tall through what they held back, finding strength and stature in their restraint. One memorable late role in which he did the latter was as NYPD Captain Burt Grusinky in James Gray’s crime thriller We Own the Night, in which he played a thoughtful Hagen-like patriarch who gradually loses a handle on his two sons, then dies in spectacular fashion during an ambush on a rain-soaked expressway.

He only had a few lines in that movie, but it was enough to make him an anchor for the drama. The thing about great screen performers like Duvall is that, whether they played it big or small, the scene was often centered on them. It’s the secret that a select few have managed to grasp — especially those who came up alongside him, including the actor’s former roommates, Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman. Each had his own alchemy for drawing our attention. In Duvall’s case, it was about reining in the beast or unleashing it, rip-roaring through scenes or vanishing within them. Barking orders as bombs dropped or receding unforgettably into the dark.