Karlovy Vary 2025 Review: SENTIMENTAL VALUE Weaves Family, Art, Memory Into Lyrical Domestic Epic

Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier’s follow-up to the millennial coming-of-age portrait The Worst Person in the World is Sentimental Value, a family drama centered on two sisters and a shared family home. The film opens at the intersection of mourning and self-mythology, establishing a tone that sustains its exploration of familial fracture, artistic projection, and the sediment of memory.

Trier, now in his sixth collaboration with screenwriter Eskil Vogt, has consistently examined the tension between interior life and outward behavior. His so-called Oslo Trilogy (Reprise, Oslo, August 31st, and The Worst Person in the World) charted generational disaffection through subjectively inflected stories, often focused on young adults in states of transition and uncertainty.

With Sentimental Value, Trier shifts his focus to the intergenerational, examining how children internalize, resist, and ultimately reflect the shortcomings of their parents, and how domestic spaces come to hold both personal history and emotional stasis. While his earlier films traced individuals grappling with unspoken desire and uncertain direction, this work turns to the relational distances that persist between people.

The film’s structure is more polyphonic than Trier’s earlier works, shifting between characters and time periods. Sentimental Value traces the lives of the Borg sisters: Nora (Renate Reinsve), a stage actress grappling with the weight of inherited ambition, and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), the more pragmatic sibling, whose role as mother and caretaker masks her own unaddressed needs. Their estranged father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), reenters their lives after a prolonged absence. Another central presence in Trier’s drama is the Borg family house in Oslo, which has served as a multigenerational anchor across decades.

Gustav makes an unexpected appearance at the wake of his late ex-wife, gradually reinserting himself into the lives of his now-adult daughters. What initially seems like an attempt at reconciliation and belated atonement soon reveals more self-serving motives. A celebrated filmmaker, Gustav is preparing what appears to be both a comeback and a likely swan song. While Agnes once starred in his most acclaimed work, he now approaches Nora, an eccentric, if volatile, actress, with an offer to play the lead in a new film he claims to have written specifically for her.

The request reopens old wounds. Nora refuses the offer without reading the script, unable to comprehend how her father could be so oblivious to the damage he has caused. Gustav, unwilling, or perhaps unable, to fully grasp what his daughters require from him, moves forward with the project. He reunites with former collaborators and casts a new lead: a young American star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who soon emerges as a stand-in for Nora.

As with The Worst Person in the World, Trier and his team take an unexpected route with Sentimental Value, shaping a psychological family drama with occasional comic undertones. Gustav’s character arc receives as much narrative weight as that of the sisters, and is laced with film references and cinephile in-jokes. The sisters’ uncertainty over their father’s return plays out alongside his pre-production efforts, which include securing Netflix as a partner. In one scene, Gustav appears genuinely puzzled when, at a Netflix promotional event, a journalist asks whether the film will also screen in cinemas. 'Where else?' he replies, momentarily disoriented.

Sentimental Value is as narratively dense as The Worst Person in the World, spanning four generations of the Borg family as they confront their relationships and sense of belonging. The family home functions both as a stabilizing presence and a space in flux. Gustav delays selling the house, eventually deciding to use it as the primary location for his film. The project, a period drama said to be inspired by his late mother, uncannily mirrors aspects of Nora’s life, leaving those close to her puzzled, especially given Gustav’s longstanding absence from her personal history.

Sentimental Value is slower, more diffuse, and more architectural in form than The Worst Person in the World, adopting a labyrinthine structure to explore the layering of emotion over time, across roles and generations within a family history. It also functions as a quiet homage to art, as both an existential necessity and a thinly veiled therapy.

Sentimental Value will be released in US theaters on November 7, 2025 by Neon.