The below is an advanced review out of the Sundance Film Festival. The Worst Person in the World will hit U.S. theaters on Feb. 4, 2022.
Few movies that are divided into chapters, with on-screen numbers and titles for each one, feel as justified in their structure as The Worst Person in the World, a film told in 14 parts. From Norwegian director Joachim Trier, who co-wrote the script with long-time collaborator Eskil Vogt, it’s the third entry in what has been loosely dubbed their “Oslo Trilogy,” following similar coming-of-age (and coming-of-aging) stories like Reprise (2006) and Oslo, August 31st (2011). Its swift initial scenes are rife with playful narration, and they follow the radiant and indecisive Julie (Renate Reinsve) — pronounced “yool-ya” — through her college years, as she switches career paths and hairstyles while searching for lifelong purpose. However, the main focus of each new chapter is a challenging new transitionary phase of her early adulthood, and the romantic relationships that bear the brunt of her uncertainty. Bolstered by a tremendous lead performance, it proves quietly magnetic in its reflective moments, before its realism occasionally gives way to brief but effervescent stylizations, which bring to the fore unspoken magic and heartache.
As Julie, Reinsve’s eyes frequently search for some target on which to focus — some kind of solid ground — and they remain in paradoxical concert with the camera, which in turn remains transfixed on her darting gaze. Even her long-term relationship with Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a successful cartoonist some 15 or 20 years her senior, doesn’t provide the foundation for which she’s probing, which often leads to misdirected frustrations. However, after an evening of wandering the streets and contemplating her future, she crashes a stranger’s wedding and immediately hits it off with one of the guests, the young and chipper Elvind (Herbert Nordrum), a barista with a bright smile and an infectiously sunny disposition. Their short, exciting evening together — which they decide outright will involve no physical contact, since they’re both in relationships — allows her fleeting moments of stillness and assurance. For what feels like the first time, her gaze is steady.
Before they part ways, unsure of when or if they’ll meet again, they engage in truths and dares that feel perverse at first, but are approached with such gentleness as to be comforting and freeing. The chapter in which they cross paths is titled “Cheating,” and though it features no sexual infidelity, it’s wrapped in an intoxicating emotional rush, whose absence is immediately palpable once Julie returns home to Aksel, and to her daily routine. The joy she feels goes hand-in-hand with a looming guilt, and both emotions are readily transposed onto us thanks to Reinsve, who magnifies each subtlety and nuance through doubtful glances that bring the film’s title (“Verdens verste menneske” in its original Norwegian) into stark and unavoidable view. Julie is hardly “the worst person in the world” in the grand scheme of things, but she spends so much time stewing in personal and professional limbo that it’s all she knows, so the momentary act of pushing forward, towards something real and tangible, feels to her like the gravest sin. It hardens her usual sweetness into something callous and aggressive — something she can’t quite explain.
With every look and every provocation, Reinsve’s performance seems to ask whether romance is viable, or even possible, when you can’t be sure of who you are from one day to the next. Even in her brightest moments, Julie teeters constantly at the edge of an unknown crevice, a precariousness that turns her worst impulses simultaneously inward, towards herself, and outward, towards Aksel. Desperate to move forward in life, she both bristles at her inertia while also languishing in the reality that she has no idea what her first step in that direction would even look like. This long-standing, confounding dilemma soon begins to permeate her relationship, resulting in argument death-spirals that are as frustrating to watch as they are scarily true-to-life.
Each new chapter offers Julie a new and unnerving mirror. Early into her relationship, she spends time with some of Aksel’s friends: couples his age who are not-so-happily married with children, and whose presence forces Julie and Aksel to imagine different versions of a conventional future together, and to question which, if any, they might be suited for. Julie, given her own parental baggage (which the film goes on to explore), is unable to land on a concrete answer, and as the story progresses through the years, she hopscotches around the idea of motherhood as if its outlines are drawn not in chalk, but in flame.
If Julie is defined by her preoccupations with a murky future, Aksel is equally defined by his past, and the social conventions he stubbornly sticks to as an artist in his 40s caught up in a changing world. Reinsve had a supporting part in Oslo, August 31st, but Danielsen Lie has been a key fixture of all three films in Trier’s spiritual trilogy. Though no longer the lead here, his role as Aksel feels like a fitting culmination; as Reprise’s idealistic 23-year-old Phillip and Oslo’s disillusioned 34-year-old Anders, the actor felt like he was searching for some unspoken truth just out of reach. As the 40-something Aksel, that truth seems to slip further away from him, and the continued lack of certainty turns him ferociously bitter (and, in a deeply ironic turn, when certainty finally comes Aksel’s way, it arrives in a form for which he could not possibly have prepared). The film is, in many ways, a concentrated dose of what it has felt like to be alive for the last half decade or so, between head-spinning adjustments of perspective in the face of social upheaval — larger forces like climate change, #MeToo, and “cancel culture” rear their unavoidable heads, and trickle down into minor interactions — and the ensuing clouds of all-encompassing uncertainty that both drive and hamper millennials like Julie.
Trier and cinematographer Kasper Tuxen capture Julie in moments of both connection and loneliness. There’s an almost musical rhythm to the way they switch between two-shots of her alongside other characters, and single shots in which she’s drowning in empty lateral space, even as she talks to people just out of frame. It’s a subtle but compounding whiplash, and it not only gives way to silent and isolated scenes — naturalistic and often heartbreaking ones, in which Reinsve becomes so unsettled by her own presence that she practically comes undone — but it also grants permission to a rare exuberance, laying the path for sequences in which time stands still in moments of fluttering infatuation, and collapses during a paranoid mushroom trip that brings Julie’s fears of aging and parenthood charging to the fore.
What reads like a haphazard tonal clash on paper is harmonious in execution, because Trier’s usual realism and these formal flourishes are both rooted firmly in a story where one woman’s desires (professional, emotional, sexual and otherwise) are at the constant mercy of her own self-loathing and her corrosive tendencies. When she grants herself permission to feel fully, and deserve unabashedly, it’s the most freeing sensation in the world, even if it only lasts a few moments at a time — or for as long as she can allow herself to hold onto them.
A deeply heartfelt romance about the right person at the wrong time, the wrong person at the right time, and how no one can be right when you feel wrong no matter what.
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