The Worst Person in the World

Joachim Trier's The Worst Person in the World (Verdens verste menneske) won the Cannes Best Actress prize for Renate Reinsve in 2021, on her first major lead role, and was nominated for two Academy Awards including Best Original Screenplay (with Eskil Vogt) and Best International Feature Film. The film is the third of Trier's Oslo Trilogy, after Reprise and Oslo, August 31st, and was widely received as the moment Trier moved from significant Norwegian filmmaker to internationally consequential auteur.

Julie (Reinsve, in a star-making performance) drifts between careers (medicine, psychology, photography, writing) and between two men: Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie, returning from Reprise and Oslo, August 31st), an older comic-book artist whose work has just been criticised for misogyny, and Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), a younger barista with whom she has a chemistry the film stages with unusual erotic candour. Across twelve chapters, a prologue and an epilogue, Julie attempts to figure out what kind of life she wants and arrives at no consoling answer.

The famous chapter where Julie magically pauses the entire city of Oslo to run from Aksel's apartment to Eivind's café is one of the most cinematically joyful sequences of the 2020s. The closing chapters, dealing with Aksel's terminal cancer, are among the most quietly devastating recent passages in Norwegian cinema. Reinsve continues her Trier collaboration in Sentimental Value.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most acute portrait of a woman in her late twenties European cinema produced this decade, and Reinsve's career-launching performance. The Oslo run sequence alone justifies the canonical place.