Julie (Renate Reinsve) is a young woman who feels stuck as she drifts through life trying to find out who she wants to be.  Through multiple relationships, jobs, and friendships, she slowly begins to find her path, but it does not come easy.  She has to leave some people behind her in order to grow, a difficult decision for all of us, and the guilt of letting those people down makes Julie feel like the titular The Worst Person in the World. 

Writer/director Joachim Trier reteams with his muses, fellow screenwriter Eskil Vogt and leading man Anders Danielsen Lie to round out their (un)official Oslo trilogy, released by Neon.  The film charts a formative period in Julie’s life through a series of twelve chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue.  At only 128 minutes, the film tells a massive story of growth and discovery.  It is akin to a coming-of-age story geared towards young adults as it hits on all the confusing feelings of settling down with someone, finding a career, and staying true to one’s hobbies and interests. 

At the heart of the film is Julie.  Being her story, she is in almost every scene of the film and Reinsve has an incredibly difficult task in this story.  She is not a perfectly innocent protagonist, the script shows her thorns and all, and it is how she handles these flaws – though it seems unfair to call them such – that makes us fall for her.  While Julie does many things that are not only atypical for a leading woman in a romantic dramedy, many of her actions are particularly frustrating as we watch her make some poor choices, but through Reinsve’s work, we are always rooting for the best for Julie. 

For the opening half of the film, Reinsve’s Julie is in a relationship with Lie’s Aksel; an older cartoonist who is known for his raunchy, and through a modern lens offensive, Bobcat comics.  Aksel, like Julie, is far from an idealized romantic lead.  He is incredibly rigid and set in his ways, prickly to deal with, and quite controlling as he works to guide Julie into becoming his ideal girl.  It is a strange dynamic, to say the least, but like that friend we all have in what we deem a poor relationship, we can think what we want about it, but we bite our tongue because it seems that Julia is happy.  That is until she isn’t. 

The film throws its first coincidence pretty early on, but later we realize that this is just the opening act in a film full of magic realism, when Julie meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) at a wedding she crashed on the way home from a gallery open house for Aksel.  Filling the role of, for lack of a better word, the shiny new toy, Eivind charms us with his plainness and his much more agreeable nature when compared to Askel. The two flirt all through the night while pushing the boundaries of what is – or rather, is not – considered cheating on their partners, but one thing is clear: they share a much more traditional chemistry than Julie does with Askel. Nordrum injects his goofball character with lots of life and personality which makes for an enjoyable middle act and as the two grow closer through various chance encounters, we realize in tandem with Julie that her time with Askel is coming to an end. This is achieved through another truly charming scene when the world stands still and Julie takes off from her flat shared with Aksel and runs through the town until she reunites with Eivind, the only other animated person in this fantasy. Trier peppers his film with many instances of these more fanciful sequences which are some of the high points of the film as it leans into the lighthearted tropes of a romantic comedy, almost winkingly, before returning to what can be described as an “anti-romcom” story.  

Unfortunately, as the events of the film unfold the third act of The Worst Person in the World begins to unravel as it takes away much of the agency Julie had over her story in the preceding chapters. Her relationships were always a focus of the film, but she was always in control and making decisions for herself. In these final chapters, she shows an unusual reliance on the men in her life. It is not necessarily a bad thing at face value, but seeing as the better half of the film highlights her independence, for the film’s closing chapters to show her filling this tamed, late-stage Petruchio role feels like a total betrayal of who we know Julie to be. While there are a few brief flashes of her independence – turning down a physical advance, for instance – these chapters seem strangely manipulative towards her, and we have seen prior that she is not one that just lies down to be melded by the men in her life. 

The Worst Person in the World is still a very enjoyable film despite its stumbled landing. While the societal structure in Norway and the magic of cinema give Julie a nice safety net when it comes to meeting her needs of health and shelter – when compared to her counterparts in the United States, she is living quite well on a bookstore clerk’s salary – the emotional themes of the film tranced nationalities and make the film endlessly relatable as all good coming-of-age films are. It is an incredibly easy film to watch, and while we may find ourselves shaking our heads at Julie’s decisions like she is the heroine of a horror film, it is so incredibly refreshing to see such a “normal” character represented on screen. Life is messy, choices need to be made each day – some harder than others – and The Worst Person in the World perfectly encapsulates the guilt we can sometimes feel when we put ourselves first. Where the script excels, though, is that it does not truly villainize any character. It shows the natural ebb and flow of relationships as they happen in life and that is what makes the film rather unique in a genre loaded with fairytale endings.