*This piece is part of our Critics In Conversation series, where two writers offer different perspectives on the same film. Read Lucia Ruan’s review here, and Wesley Stenzel’s review here.*
Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World has a title that makes you wonder: Who is this person, and how bad could they be?
She’s not the best, as it turns out, but understandably so. Julie (Renate Reinsve) is a woman on the cusp between her twenties and thirties who spends the prologue, epilogue, and all twelve chapters of this film navigating the most prominent pillars of her life—love, career and family—to the best of her ability. If you’re a young adult, this probably sounds a lot like you and most people you know. And from personal or vicarious experience, you’ll also know how messy and difficult it is to find yourself in the moving, fragmented pieces of these pillars before they manage to align.
For Julie, it begins with medicine. She starts off as a medical student admittedly drawn to the field by prestige, a powerful force that quietly governs the lives of many young adults, from college admissions to post-grad recruitment. Though Julie continues to excel at the top of her class, she begins to sense “a gnawing unease she had tried to suppress by cramming or drowning it in digital interference.” Yep, another direct attack on everyone in this generation. So she pivots from the body to the mind, ending up in the field of psychology—a common beacon of meaning for lost souls and a particularly soothing glow for those burnt by the flame of prestige.
Soon thereafter, she realizes that “actually, she was a visual person,” and decides to pursue photography. Ah, yes, the arts as a solution to your existential crisis. Another classic. In between occupational crossroads, Julie hops between a few guys, each a new and exciting blip in the narrative of her life. Eventually she meets Aksel, who sticks around for a while despite his initial unavailability and forewarnings about their age difference. Ironically enough, this is a defining moment between the two of them that keeps Julie interested. Some might say it’s patterns like these that make someone a “bad person” via the hurt and inconsistency they unleash on those around them. Maybe so, but these symptoms are common in youth.
The Worst Person in the World is an excruciatingly relatable story about modern life as a young adult. Youth brings with it mobility, excitement, and the fallacy of limitless possibility. These raw energies exist in tension with adulthood’s expectations of commitment and focus, which Trier illustrates through internal conflict after conflict in Julie. Every time someone asks Julie what she does for a living, we’re right there with her in the headlights as she hesitates before offering a meek response. Those who have been between college majors or faced a degree of uncertainty about their future have experienced the same contained panic at that “vulgar” slur of a question. And Julie brings you along as she tries to navigate lackluster reactions with as much grace as she can manage. We hear you, Julie. We understand your struggle, and we stand with you.
All this is a testament to the refined acting of Renate Reinsve, who exposes Julie’s inner turmoil with a demeanor so effortless she seems as though she’s not acting as much as reliving past memories. Her performance is complemented by Anders Danielsen Lie’s Aksel, who shares with her a chaotic chemistry that brings out both romance and toxicity in a series of “just relationship things”—struggles like maintaining an autonomous identity within a relationship and deciding whether or not to have kids. How predictable yet prescient to contemporary love life.
Beneath these relationship conflicts are Julie conflicts. Again, Reinsve illuminates in her performance the temptation of novelty, excitement and mischief when Julie crashes a party and meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum). As her eyes widen and a smile flushes into her cheeks, we see very clearly the rush of being somewhere you’re not supposed to be, with someone you’re not supposed to be with. Moments like these produce a slap-in-the-face sort of empathy that plants you in Julie’s tingly shoes and makes you wonder whether you’d be a bad person in the same position, too.
Trier takes care to plot these conflicts along the axis of time, pronounced by technological and cosmetic changes. No detail too small, Julie’s iPhone loses its home button and grows a notch between chapters. Her Mac gains a touch bar as she goes from student to writer. Her hair changes color and length with the seasons of her life. Sometimes, even time itself freezes, reflecting the pause that Julie desperately needs in order to figure out her life and the people in it. That, and the romantic feeling of meeting someone who makes your heart skip a beat and your clock skip several as it melts away the way it would in a Salvador Dali. It’s through incisive observations like these that Trier’s craft takes its shape in this late coming of age (or coming to terms with age?) story.
Beyond visual details, the screenwriting and dialogue is topical and piercing to the modern ear. From dinner parties to living room confinements, Trier shapes contexts where his characters can talk candidly, and his actors do not fail to deliver. Julie is clever and snarky in the way she questions the patriarchy and pokes fun at tropes like mansplaining. She’s a well-written antithesis of over-analysis, as she comments directly on the limited power of language to describe feelings and occasionally drops bombs like “I love you, but I don’t” and “I feel like a spectator in my own life.” These quotes don’t really make sense on paper but make perfect sense accompanied by her delivery of heart, soul, and body language. Aksel, closer to forty in age, captures the aching frustration of time passing him by faster than he can keep up. We feel his agony when his comic book character Bobcat loses his “starfish” to censorship, when he gets canceled on live TV, and most of all, when he faces the existential dread of terminal cancer. For Julie, Aksel then becomes the personification of time, his decline a reminder of its scarcity. For Aksel, his late days with Julie become a prompt, an opportunity to articulate in his own analytical style how the looming threat of death has forced his reflection inwards and backwards with a tinge of melancholic nostalgia.
Even the narrator has a distinct voice of its own, like some kind of omniscient brainchild of Julie’s subconscious. It comments on the climate of any given situation, with no regard for niceties. For example, “the sum of western guilt sat next to him on the couch and went to bed with him at night” is a phrase Eivind would never vocalize to describe his partner Sunniva’s eco-friendly lifestyle changes, but certainly must have crossed his mind at some point, at least subconsciously. Not to mention, lines like these gave the narrator a sense of humor of its own, adding a comedic lightness to the heavy topics in its jurisdiction. Together with the film’s chapters, the narration helped make sense of the chaos in Julie’s life, much like the way our internal narrative romanticizes and main-characterizes our own—a habit that is not only natural, but sometimes necessary to keep us from falling apart.
The Worst Person in the World brings nothing new to the table, but in the best way. It’s an ode to youth and a portrait of modern life examined under the keenest of eyes and laid out in a neat storybook fashion you can easily digest and weave back into your own life. Julie’s scramble to find herself, and the dilemmas she faces from love to career, remind us that we’re not alone in this moving puzzle of life. She reminds us that change, heartbreak and ticking clocks are inevitable, but so be it. Being young is about meandering your way into something that suits you and fucking up all over the place along the way. Growing old is about making sense of your messy life and passing your lessons along to those who will listen. The worst person in the world here is Julie, but in reality, this movie is all about you.