As 47, it can probably be said that Norwegian director Joachim Trier is no longer a newcomer. His first film, Reprise, was released in 2006 and it announced a director whose vision was so exciting and unique, he became an immediate must-watch. Trier has yet to replicate the international success of Reprise, though I’d argue his films have only gotten more precise, delving deeper into his meditations of melancholy, ambition and identity. His fifth film, The Worst Person in the World, feels like both his most micro and macro film to date. Its center is a flighty young woman (the absolutely astounding Renate Reinsve) and her relationship with two men in her late twenties and early thirties; but its vision sees the full scope of contemporary human behavior. Sex, class, love, #Metoo, climate change and pop culture all have a place amongst its themes, and yet Worst Person manages to stay miraculously taut.

The script – written by Trier and his usual writing partner Eskil Vogt – is formatted in “twelve chapters, with a prologue and an epilogue”. The effect is less like a novel, and more like a fourteen-track visual record, each movement playing a new variation on a theme, following the flakey Julie (Reinsve) as she hurtles through a hilariously varied array of college majors before settling on photography, a choice that leads to her longterm employment in a college bookstore (this detail hits almost too close to home for me). Romantically, she meets the comic book artist Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a peevish but thoughtful man in his forties who’s immediately wary of his age difference with Julie but helpless against her charms. Their relationship is the meat of The Worst Person in the World, which takes their romance and expands it into a rumination on the fragility of human happiness.

The film is the third in a loose “Oslo trilogy”, beginning with Reprise and Trier’s second film, Olso, August 31st. All three films star Danielsen Lie, a doctor who wandered into acting and has given Trier’s films a much needed vulnerability to contrast the filmmaker’s taste for brooding recalcitrance (his small role in Bergman Island is another example of his ability to make a marked impact in limited screentime). His Aksel is a bookish type who spouts Freudian philosophy and produces R. Crumb-like “underground” illustrations of a wildcat who partakes in lurid – some say misogynistic – activity. Aksel’s work, popular with young men of the early 00s, is met with derision in today’s climate, especially from women (even Julie confesses to thinking so), and his strong convictions make him a perfect target in the so-called “cancel culture”. As Trier’s film often walks the tight rope of high drama and realism, so too does Danielsen Lie perfect the director’s perpetual contrasts.

But the star here is Reinsve. For the first time, he has an actor able to hit his script’s comic beats with confidence and gusto, all while staying within the story’s bittersweet milieu. Best known for her work in Norwegian sitcoms, she had momentarily given up the acting profession shortly before agreeing to be in this film. Julie’s behavior, and Reinsve’s rendering of it, will keep the audience guessing if she is the character that the title suggests. Like a lot of Worst Person, the title is an exaggeration of internal struggle. Julie’s main struggle is not happiness but satisfaction. From a young age, she fears she’s physically unable to arrive at fulfillment, a universal millennial contention that is keeping a generation up at night. What keeps Julie from being the “worst person in the world” is that she is still trying to find that satisfaction, even if it comes at the expense of those she loves.

Halfway through the film, Julie leaves Aksel for Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) a barista who excites Julie’s dangerous side. Eivind is also seeing someone when they first meet, and he and Julie challenge each other to only do things to each other that would not be considered cheating. What follows is a sequence of shocking intimacy, unsexy exhibitionism in the form of eroticism. Julie abandons the intellectual stimulation of Aksel for the physical simplicity of Eivind. She knows even as she does it that she is just plugging one hole at the expense of another. Why make these rash decisions? Why jump from rock to rock? Aksel makes Oedipal theories about Julie’s troubled relationship with her absentee father (Vidar Sandem), while she supposes the constant stigma of the internet age, too many screens and too much bad news to find monotony attractive.

The Worst Person in the World doesn’t try to solve Julie, or more accurately, it suggests that different answers might be more correct at different times in her life. The film works so well because it makes no time to moralize about her decisions or her failings. That Reinsve gives one of the best performances of the year also helps. Trier, much closer to Aksel in age than Julie, actually excels in telling a story of generational communion – as opposed to divide – and Reinsve helps him explore the existential dread of being a young person in late capitalism. Even as she affects aloofness, Julie is gripped with fear of her biological clock and her confidence in her ability to ever become a fully adult person. As is always the case in life, her lessons are learned only when it’s too late.

I absolutely loved this film. It is Trier’s most complete exercise, replicating the frenetic energy of Reprise while still containing the reflectiveness of his later films, proving that you can make a film about youth and mortality at the same time. Reinsve’s Julie is definitely the best performance in any of his films. Her work is so confident, both in its comedic timing and its dramatic gravitas, a flawless rendition that results in a person that is both identifiable and larger than life. Trier will always be a director who serves characters first, though his formalist touches have only become more adventurous with each passing film, sprinkling surreal and magical elements throughout. The Worst Person in the World confirms that Trier is amongst the best directors we have today.

 

Directed by Joachim Trier