Mark Reviews Movies: THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD

The Worst Person in the World, NEON

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 3, 2022

Sometimes, what you want or don't want—or, for that matter, a thing you aren't certain if want or not—is going to conflict with someone else's wants. That turns out to be the case—and often—for Julie (Renate Reinsve), the protagonist of The Worst Person in the World. The title is intentionally hyperbolic, except, at times, for Julie, whose mixture of indecisiveness, compassion, and insecurity certainly must make her feel that way.

At various points, co-writer/director Joachim Trier's film is a romance, a depiction of a relationship slowly but surely reaching its end, a comedy about modern living, and a tragedy about the how the emptiness of that way of life can make one miss what really matters. It's brought together, though, as a coming-of-age story about someone who turns 30 about midway through the narrative.

While that might sound as if Trier and co-screenwriter Eskil Vogt are making a cynical or ironic dig at their protagonist, they're not (A gag about how much her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, etc. did by the age of 30 does, though, mischievously puts Julie's life in a certain perspective). For all of the confusion, doubts, and missed opportunities Julie experiences through this period of her life, there's a certain optimism behind it. After all, we never stop growing up until we stop living.

As messy as Julie's life and the mishmash of ideas within it become, the screenplay divides its story neatly into 12 chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue. In the prologue, we meet Julie in college in Oslo, hoping to become a surgeon. After some consideration, she shifts gears, and realizing that her "true passion" has always been in the workings of the mind, Julie decides to become a psychiatrist. Finally, she realizes that she's more of a visual person and takes up photography, while paying the bills by working at a bookstore. No further summation or explanation of Julie's mercurial personality is really necessary after all of this.

Anyway, Julie meets Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) at a party near the end of the prologue. He's a comic book artist, known for a juvenile bobcat character, and in his early 40s. On their first night together in bed, he tells her that a relationship would be a bad idea. He's older and looking for things—stability and security and children—that Julie isn't and shouldn't be considering at this point in her life. That, our disembodied and occasionally cheeky narrator announces, is when Julie realized she loved Aksel.

The story observes the ups, the downs, and the mostly complacent periods of that romance. On Aksel's mind is the notion of finally growing up—leaving behind his obscene cartoon character and starting a family with Julie. She wants kids—eventually but not now.

The chapters—which are better described as vignettes of Julie's relationship with Aksel, her attempts to find her voice, her difficult relationship with her disinterested father (played by Vidar Sandem), her flirtations with and eventual feelings for another man, and the consequences of all of that on the first thing—start with that debate, at a party with Aksel's friends with kids. From there, the relationship doesn't so much spiral toward an end, as it simply rests there. Aksel finds it comfortable and rewarding. Julie seems to be looking for something more, catches hints of it, and keeps searching.

There's a certain truth in how incidental and trivial all of these episodes seem in isolation, such as the quirky way in which Julie meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), a man who becomes much more important than his introduction would suggest, after leaving Aksel at a book event and crashing a wedding reception. The two are clearly attracted to each other, but since both are dating someone else, they make a game of how far they can take their night-long interaction without actually cheating.

By the way, we eventually meet Eivind's partner Sunniva (Maria Grazia Di Meo), who becomes an environmentalist after coming face-to-face with a reindeer on a camping trip. The narrator informs us this encounter became a funny little story that Eivind would tell others, but like with the funny little stories that make up this charting of Julie's late 20s and early 30s, there was something much deeper beneath the anecdote for Sunniva and, as a result, for Eivind, too.

Thus, life, love, lust, loss, and learning go for Julie, through parties, minor fame with an article about oral sex, an incident with psychedelics that forces her to confront her deepest fears, and a standout sequence in which the world literally stops for her in a spontaneous rush toward a romantic possibility. The payoff to that last one, in which Julie and Aksel have a conversation she has been dreading for some time, shows how well Trier finds a sense of balance between the light comedy of Julie's adventures and emotional sincerity. The story's last act, as one character deals with the finality of what life has meant, puts the whole of the main character, the central romances, and the fleetingness of these moments into a stark, devastating perspective.

Reinsve is almost instinctively charming in the lead role, and there's a genuine sense of how much these experiences and relationships come to shape Julie by the end (Meanwhile, Danielsen Lie is comforting, wise, and ultimately heartbreaking as the inspiration—but not the reason—for some of that change). With its sometimes-uncertain structure and assortment of ideas, The Worst Person in the World may occasionally feel like a collection of broadly connected scenes. As we see how far the central character has come, though, what's happening beneath this jumbled narrative becomes apparent and offers some bittersweet encouragement.

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