The Worst Person in the World Review

Trier's film is structured as a prologue, twelve chapters and an epilogue, which sounds like a gimmick and plays like a confession: Julie's twenties are episodic because that is how they feel from the inside. She switches from medicine to psychology to photography, from one partner to another, and the film refuses either to punish her for it or to pretend it costs nothing. Renate Reinsve does something very difficult, playing someone charming, selfish and genuinely searching without letting any one of the three read as the true answer underneath.

The set piece where the city freezes and she runs across Oslo to another man is justly famous, and it earns its magic by being purely about wanting rather than having. Anders Danielsen Lie's Aksel supplies the gravity, and the late hospital chapters turn a comedy about indecision into something much heavier with no audible change of gear. A mushroom sequence is the one indulgent stretch. Otherwise this is the best film anybody has made about the specific dread of a thirtieth birthday.