Nick-Davis.com: The Worst Person in the World

The Worst Person in the World
aka Verdens verste menneske
First screened in October 2021 / Most recently screened and reviewed in November 2025

Director: Joachim Trier. Cast: Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum, Marianne Krogh, Vidar Sandem, Thea Stabell, Maria Grazia Di Meo, Hans Olav Brenner, Helene Bjørneby, Karen Røise Kielland, Ruby Dagnall. Screenplay: Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt.

In Brief: Plenty of promise. Plainly aims for greatness, but loses a few battles to banality and contrivance.

VOR: ④ I don't personally respond to all its creative choices or uneven delivery on concepts, but at least it's got ambitions and an air of something new.

I tried this movie a second time in advance of heading to Sentimental Value later this afternoon and in the wake of its (to me) surprisingly durable critical and popular reputation. Sad to say it didn't go any better for me on second pass. The fast-paced, extremely Joachim Trier prologue exists to establish that Renate Reinsve's Julie is congenitally fickle and darts away from anything that gets difficult. I might have preferred to see that dramatized rather than PowerPointed at us so flashily, but this proves typical of an almost objectively overlong movie that is almost always moving too quickly or too slowly for its story's needs. I'm not sure I believe the Julie I'm with for 130 minutes was ever a top student in medicine or psychotherapy, nor do I believe later on that she is a striking writer whose work breaks through when she gives it a chance. Starting with that weird false flag of a film title, Trier continually asserts things about Julie that neither his script nor Renate Reinsve's Cannes-winning performance backs up with much force.

In that same vein, I don't really buy that Anders Danielsen Lie's Aksel would ever have been so taken with Julie, much less that he would later consider her the love of his life and a sure thing to be a good mother, should she ever elect to go that route. It is possible that The Worst Person in the World means to be an on-screen collection of linked stories in which people constantly fib to each other and lie to themselves, including in their old age or on their deathbeds, which don't always coincide. But if that's the goal, Trier's direction never pulls it into focus as a choice. The movie instead bespeaks an ever-varying but rarely persuasive imbalance of showing and telling. In both areas, we get instances of getting too much or too little, exacerbated by an Arnaud Desplechin-like problem where Worst Person often feels like it wanted to be a novel more than a movie while just as often feeling like a movie that's most comfortable when it deprioritizes the novelistic virtues of dialogue, plot, or arc in favor of sudden bursts of audiovisual flamboyance. I also felt this way about Trier's breakout Reprise but wasn't much happier with Thelma, where he admirably challenged himself to make a more extravagantly movie-ish movie that felt like the work of a different artist.

I'm not exactly sure what I want from Trier, since I've now seen five of his movies without my needle ever once rising more than halfway, and I don't think I'd likely read his prose work if he produced any. And yet, I keep feeling hopeful, including on this train toward my Sentimental Value matinée, because I appreciate that there's a specific point of view here, that he does take risks from film to film even if certain temperaments and temperatures stay mostly steady, and so many people I know and respect identify deeply with his artistry. Overlong as it is, Worst Person has some unusual shambolic energy to it (a compliment), a valuable interest in the ambiguous shifts between one's thirties and one's forties, and a couple of finely etched scenes (e.g., a visit to Julie's distant father, where she accedes again to his obvious insincerity and silently wishes Aksel wouldn't take such a stand on her behalf). The film also looks pretty good, even if a little more grain and texture wouldn't go amiss.

Plenty else, though, I just find unconvincing in Worst Person specifically, including Trier's tendency to hard-sell the very things that, to my eye and ear, lack for credibility. In two scenes that the movie absolutely didn't need—one an excursus into the life of a new lover's recent ex, the other a televised radio talkshow where Aksel gets grilled about the sexual politics of his old work—the movie tips into outright snideness and a pretty jejune POV on what it might consider "topical" issues. The long sequence in which Julie first meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) is an over-extended conceit and inadequate to the narrative and thematic pressure that will later land on this bond, if that's what it is. And if I haven't lost you already, I find the movie's big formal/emotional gambit, Julie's impulsive sprint through an Oslo otherwise frozen in place, pretty embarrassing in its six-minute air of self-admiration, and not all that rewarding at levels of story or character.

At the end, I don't feel like I have much of a sense of Julie, which is different from having a complex acquaintance with someone who eludes easy labeling. The first time I saw Worst Person, I suspected Trier was going to need to kill someone off in Julie's small and fluctuating circle so that she could borrow some depth by association with their predicament. Guess what happened! In the event, the movie's best performance gets even a little bit better but the central one remains blurry to me, because the character as written still feels a few drafts away from readiness for her closeup. Grade: B–

(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)

Academy Award Nominations:
	Best Original Screenplay: Eskil Vogt, Joachim Trier
	Best International Feature

Other Awards:
	Cannes Film Festival: Best Actress (Reinsve)
	Chicago International Film Festival: Best Cinematography (Kasper Tuxen)
	National Society of Film Critics: Best Supporting Actor (Lie)
	New York Film Critics Circle: Best Foreign Language Film

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