The Worst Person in the World
2021 · Joachim Trier
The director in the conversation
The Worst Person in the World became the millennial-zeitgeist film people got tattoos about; Sentimental Value's Cannes Grand Prix and 2025 Oscar-frontrunner status made him Scandinavia's biggest crossover since Bergman comparisons became legal again.
For when your own life feels unresolved and you want a film that gets it — funny enough for a date night, honest enough to leave you quietly rearranged. A comfort watch and a challenge at once.
What it's about
Julie is nearing thirty in Oslo and keeps reshuffling everything — careers, convictions, lovers — in search of a self that feels like hers. Over four years and two very different relationships, including one with an older comics artist whose certainties are starting to expire, she has to take an honest look at who she actually is versus who she keeps auditioning to be.
The experience
Witty, restless, and alive — it swings from screwball comedy to a hallucinatory mushroom trip to moments of sudden, devastating stillness, and somehow every register feels true. You'll laugh, wince in recognition, and probably think about your own choices on the walk home.
Performances
Renate Reinsve, a near-unknown who had considered quitting acting, won Best Actress at Cannes for a performance of quicksilver intelligence — charming and evasive in the same gesture. Anders Danielsen Lie is heartbreaking as the comics artist watching his generation's moment pass.
The craft
Joachim Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt structure the four years as twelve chapters with a prologue and epilogue — novelistic scaffolding that frees the film to change tone on a dime, including a couple of formally audacious set pieces that have become instantly recognizable. The writing is precise about things most romantic comedies blur.
Why it matters
The closing panel of Trier's loose Oslo trilogy became a word-of-mouth phenomenon and an Oscar nominee, and turned Reinsve into an international star overnight — the defining millennial-adrift film of its moment.
Essays & theory: a reading of The Worst Person in the World →
Reception & legacy: how The Worst Person in the World was received, argued over, and remembered →
The closing panel of Joachim Trier's loose Oslo trilogy — after Reprise and Oslo, August 31st — follows Julie, a woman nearing thirty who keeps reshuffling careers, convictions, and lovers in search of a self that feels like hers. Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt structure the four years in twelve chapters with a prologue and epilogue, a novelistic scaffolding that frees the film to shift registers: screwball one moment, mushroom-trip grotesque the next, then suddenly, devastatingly still. Renate Reinsve, a near-unknown who had considered quitting acting, won Best Actress at Cannes for a performance of quicksilver intelligence — charming and evasive in the same gesture — opposite Anders Danielsen Lie, the trilogy's recurring soul, here heartbreaking as a comics artist watching his generation's certainties expire. The film's most celebrated sequence, in which Oslo freezes mid-gesture so Julie can run through it, was achieved largely in camera, with hundreds of extras holding still. Trier's subject is the vertigo of limitless choice, and few recent films have caught it with such tenderness and so little judgment.
Lines of influence
- Reprise (2006) — Trier and Vogt's debut establishes the omniscient literary voiceover, conditional 'what if' branchings, and jump-cut chaptering that Worst Person refines into its twelve-chapter architecture.
- Oslo, August 31st (2011) — The middle Oslo-trilogy film pins a life-in-crisis to a mapped walk through the city and casts Anders Danielsen Lie as the articulate depressive whose exact register Worst Person reuses.
- Jules and Jim (1962) — Truffaut's rushing third-person narration compressing years of a love triangle, and its whiplash from playful montage to tragedy, is the template for Worst Person's narrated tonal shifts.
- The 400 Blows (1959) — The freeze-frame that suspends a young protagonist mid-flight prefigures the film's literal stopping of time as an externalized psychological punctuation.
- Annie Hall (1977) — Allen's titled, non-chronological dissection of a romance—with split-screen, direct address, and a heroine defined against the neurotic narrator—models the essayistic dramedy structure.
- Scenes from a Marriage (1973) — Bergman's explicitly chaptered, clinical anatomy of a Scandinavian couple's coming-apart supplies the numbered-episode scaffolding and unjudging close attention to a woman's shifting wants.
- Wild Strawberries (1957) — The episodic day-journey punctured by dream and fantasy interludes, where a life is audited through digressive set-pieces, anticipates the film's chapter-as-mood-shift design.
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) — Gondry's in-camera practical effects—reality reshaped around a character's emotional state without CGI—are the direct method behind the frozen-Oslo sequence's held extras.
- Frances Ha (2012) — Baumbach and Gerwig's chaptered (by address) portrait of a drifting late-twenties woman, blending comic buoyancy with ache, runs the same novelistic-vignette engine on a female protagonist.
- Lady Bird (2017) — Gerwig's coming-into-self study glides between comedy and hurt within single scenes and treats its heroine's mistakes with the same tenderness-without-judgment.
- Marriage Story (2019) — Baumbach builds a relationship's arc from long, actor-forward duologues that pivot abruptly from warmth to cruelty, the same performance-trusting tonal control Reinsve and Lie carry.
- The Souvenir (2019) — Hogg's autobiographical, elliptical episodes tracking a young woman's self-formation through a doomed relationship share the observational, chaptered novelistic scaffolding.
- Bergman Island (2021) — Hansen-Løve nests a story-within-a-story of romantic what-ifs and casts Anders Danielsen Lie, extending the same literary, tonally light autofiction of choice.
- Drive My Car (2021) — Hamaguchi's patient, chaptered adaptation of prose fiction—grief and desire unspooled through long dialogue and a novelistic sense of interior time—parallels the same year's literary-cinema register.
- Aftersun (2022) — Wells inherits the memory-lit, fragment-as-chapter structure and the refusal to judge, dissolving a life-defining relationship into impressionistic, tender vignettes.
- Past Lives (2023) — Song extends the vertigo-of-choice into a decades-spanning study of the road not taken, using restrained, unjudging staging and a quiet naturalism descended straight from the Oslo trilogy's tone.
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