Film

Sweet.

THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD

Give our team a helping hand.

Refer a nurse. Get rewarded!

Know an experienced nurse who would make a great addition to our healthcare team? Earn up to $1,000 when you refer a nurse who joins our team of registered nurse rockstars.

Learn more at munsonhealthcare.org/ReferANurse.

The Worst Person in the World? More like the best movie in the world. Forgive the lowhanging fruit of an opening, but sometimes the most obvious headline can also be the most true… A staggering triumph of a film, this Norwegian dramedy from acclaimed director Joachim Trier (Oslo, August 31st; Thelma) is my favorite film of the past year. It is something so special and that has moved me so singularly, it is simultaneously something I want to keep just for myself and something I want to personally share with every single person I know. It’s also a film so sparkling and so powerfully felt, that to discuss it in great depth would somehow diminish it, so feel free to just stop reading here and make your plans to go see it. But if you need a little more to go on, The Worst Person in the World follows an adrift 30-something-woman living in Oslo across twelve vignette “chapters” (plus a prologue and epilogue) as she struggles to find her path. We first meet Julie (Renate Reinsve) as she sets aside her lifetime of overachieving tendencies to drop out of medical school to become a photographer. Gorgeous, sophisticated, intelligent, wry, charming, and effortlessly cool, Julie is clearly not the worst person in the world, but in her aimlessness, in throwing away a promising career, she embodies the kind of insufferable, restless “millennial behavior” that makes you want to roll your eyes and mutter, “Uggghhh, she’s the worst.”

But Julie’s self-absorption doesn’t make her the worst—here it makes her real and wonderful and someone we can all empathize with. Julie knows she wants something more, she just has no idea what that could possibly be. And so she waits for inspiration, for something to happen. But what first happens is she falls into a relationship with the alt-comic book artist Aksel (frequent Trier collaborator Anders Danielsen Lie, who also stars in Bergman Island, making him the official indie dream boy of 2021). Aksel is older, and has already found success. But their connection is immediate and palpable and they move in together. Yet weekends spent with his couple friends and their children introduce tension, as Julie balks at having children of her own, unsure of what she wants out of a relationship and still working through her issues with her own family. And after playing the supportive girlfriend with no firm career of her own (she works in a bookstore), at one of Aksel’s big events, Julie heads out early, crashes a wedding, and has a dazzlingly epic night of flirting with a stranger (Herbert Nordrum). Their chemistry is off the charts, but could a relationship ever possibly top that initial high? Months, maybe almost a year later, after leaving Aksel for reasons Julie does not fully understand, she begins to find out. In the third act, things take a much more dramatic turn as characters confront their mortality. If you haven’t cried yet—in a movie where the whole thing is basically an empathy bomb—at that point, you no doubt will. Now if this story sounds like something you have already seen a zillion times, in a lot of ways it is; yet in watching the film, every moment somehow feels extraordinary and exhilarating. With a certain playfulness to its cinematic language and an undeniable visual genius, Trier has achieved a tremendous feat of filmmaking. This is pure cinema with several sequences—some showy, some far less so— that will stop you dead in your tracks. It’s a phenomenal script made transcendent by its performances, with Renate Reinsve, Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, giving what is undoubtedly one of the best performances of the year no matter what the Academy may have to say. Taking contradictions that would otherwise prove frustrating and making them beguiling, Reinsve is everything audiences want to love and to relate to. She is complex and flawed and absolutely perfect. Even if you think there’s no way you could possibly relate to another story of a privileged white woman with manic pixie dream girl tendencies discovering themselves, you couldn’t be further from the truth. No matter where you are in life, Julie’s struggles bring such honesty and tenderness to very human struggles and to the idea that life doesn’t need to be defined by set milestones. Shimmering with vitality, heartbreakingly alive, and lovely and limitless in its exuberance, this is a movie so good, I encourage you to see it right away.