From a last-minute casting call that won Cannes to a Palme d'Or and an Oscar in the same eighteen months — the five essential films of the most quietly commanding actress in European cinema.
Renate Reinsve trained at the Norwegian National Academy of Theatre and spent a decade in small parts, stage work and a waitressing job before Joachim Trier wrote a lead role for her. She had one line in his Oslo, August 31st in 2011; ten years later she won Best Actress at Cannes for The Worst Person in the World. She has said she was close to leaving acting altogether when the call came.
What followed is one of the fastest ascents in recent European film. Reinsve works almost entirely in Norwegian, chooses directors over vehicles, and has now appeared in a Palme d'Or winner, an Academy Award winner for Best International Feature and a Caméra d'Or winner in the space of two festival cycles. Her filmography is still short — deliberately so. Here are the five films that matter, in the order we'd watch them.
1. The Worst Person in the World (2021)
Dir. Joachim Trier · Norway · Drama / Romance / Comedy
The role Trier and Eskil Vogt wrote for her, and the one that changed everything. Julie is almost thirty, restless in Oslo, moving between careers, partners and versions of herself without committing to any of them. Trier structures the film as twelve titled chapters with a prologue and an epilogue, a form that lets him skip years without losing the texture of a life being lived in the present tense.
Reinsve won Best Actress at Cannes; the film took Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature. What makes the performance unusual is how much of it happens in reaction — Julie is often the person listening, and Reinsve lets you watch her decide what she thinks. If you see one film on this list, see this one.
2. Sentimental Value (2025)
Dir. Joachim Trier · Norway / France / Germany / Denmark / Sweden / UK · Drama
Their second collaboration, and the most decorated European film of its year: the Grand Prix at Cannes, six European Film Awards including Best Film and Best Actress, and the Academy Award for Best International Feature. Reinsve plays Nora, a stage actress, opposite Stellan Skarsgård as the film-director father who has been absent from most of her life and now wants something from her.
Trier and Vogt write about inherited emotional debt with unusual precision, and the film gives Reinsve a register she had not been asked for before — someone who performs for a living and has run out of patience for performing at home. Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas complete a cast that plays the whole thing at conversational volume. It is the fullest use anyone has yet made of her.
3. Armand (2024)
Dir. Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel · Norway / Netherlands / Germany / Sweden · Drama / Thriller
A Norwegian primary school empties out on a late afternoon and Elisabeth, an actress, is called in for an urgent meeting: her six-year-old son has been accused of something serious by another boy's parents. Almost the entire film takes place inside the building, in rooms designed for children, with adults trying to hold a procedure together.
It is the debut feature of Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel — grandson of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman, which the film earns the right to ignore — and it won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes in 2024 from Un Certain Regard. Reinsve is extraordinary and deeply uncomfortable to watch here, playing a woman whose every reaction is being assessed by people who have already decided. Norway submitted it for the Academy Awards.
4. Fjord (2026)
Dir. Cristian Mungiu · Romania / Norway / France / Denmark / Finland / Sweden · Drama
Cristian Mungiu's second Palme d'Or, nineteen years after 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and Reinsve's first lead for a director outside Norway. She plays a Norwegian woman who returns with her Romanian husband (Sebastian Stan) and their two children from Bucharest to the remote coastal village she grew up in, a move intended as a fresh start.
Mungiu's subject has always been the pressure a community can exert on a family, and at 146 minutes he takes his time applying it. The film swept Cannes 2026 — the Palme plus the FIPRESCI, Ecumenical Jury and François Chalais prizes — and it puts Reinsve into the Romanian New Wave's long-take, unblinking style, which suits her. A colder film than the Trier pictures, and a harder one.
5. Oslo, August 31st (2011)
Dir. Joachim Trier · Norway · Drama
Where it started, in the smallest possible way. Reinsve appears briefly at a party as a young woman named Renate; the part is barely a scene, and Trier remembered her from it a decade later. The film itself belongs to Anders Danielsen Lie, as a recovering addict given a day's leave from a treatment centre to attend a job interview in Oslo.
Loosely adapted from Pierre Drieu la Rochelle's novel Le Feu follet — filmed before by Louis Malle — it is the second part of Trier's Oslo trilogy and the film that established the register the other two work in: conversational, city-bound, formally quiet and emotionally exact. Watch it after the others and the party scene becomes a small piece of film history.
Where to Start
Begin with The Worst Person in the World, which is both the best entry point to Reinsve and the most widely available. Sentimental Value is the natural follow-up and the more ambitious film. Armand is the one to watch when you want to see how much she can do with a part that gives her no sympathy to lean on, and Fjord is the current release worth seeing in a cinema if it is still playing near you.
Her filmography beyond Europe is growing — she has worked in English-language film and American television since 2024 — but the Norwegian work remains where the serious performances are, and it is what this catalogue covers.
If you enjoyed these films, explore our 10 Must-Watch Norwegian Films, which places Trier's Oslo trilogy in its national context. For the festival year that gave Reinsve her Palme d'Or, see our guide to the Cannes 2026 Winners.
Joachim Trier’s supernatural thriller Thelma, made the year before The Worst Person in the World, appears in our 20 Must-Watch European Thrillers.
