The Worst Person in the World movie review (2022) – Roger Ebert

I feel like a spectator in my own life, say Julie (Renate Reinsve), a young woman still piecing together the spectrum of her emotional wants and needs. She explains this to Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), her lover who is over a decade her senior. In Julie, millennial anxiety manifests in flares of frustration and feeling stuck as she wrestles with self-discovery.

Segmented into a dozen chapters (plus a prologue and an epilogue), the literary-structured film introduces Julie with a montage of her college days trapped in a swirl of indecisiveness and exploration, between career path changes and romantic flings. But by the end of the first act, Julie will turn 30 and be faced with the looming question of potential motherhood.

Trier and his longtime co-writer Eskil Vogt constantly invigorate our understanding of Julie and her romantic partners via insightful visual digressions guided by the voice of a female narrator. Soaked in Harry Nilssons deceivingly cheerful songs, their high-spirited narrative language finds an ideal vehicle in the way cinematographer Kasper Tuxen suffuses the characters genuine visages with the softest, most elegant lighting of the Nordic skies.

Working at a bookstore, after dabbling in medicine and photography, Julie is now in the shadow of Aksel, a revered cartoonist of politically incorrect material. Hes a safe choice, a reasonable partner, but she is not ready for the commitment he desires. A montage adds to thefeeling thatshes behind on lifes schedule, showinghow the women in her lineage across generations were already raising children at her age.

Part of Julies growth in the gracefully whimsicalThe Worst Person in the World, as she navigates an estrangement from her father, comes from moments about herfortitude to step away from a situation or a person in order to pursue her own happiness. Theres an agency in her perceived recklessness that places her in a limbo between juvenile hedonism and expected maturity.

Yet, in addressing the necessary selfishness to let herself move along based on her intuitiveness, she shows a deep compassion for the human being on the other side of every schism. Its in those scenes where Julie and Aksel air out the sorrow for the things that might never come to pass between them, that Trier captures an almost shocking display of honesty, rid of any defensive armor. Here are two people that love each other, who can come to terms with the impossibility of their union at this moment in time.

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The Worst Person in the World movie review (2022) - Roger Ebert