The Worst Person in the World (2021)
★★★★ — The Worst Person in the World (2021)
There was a moment, somewhere in the first half of this film, where I genuinely thought I was watching something five stars. Not just good. Not just impressive. Five stars. The kind of film you want to ring someone about on the walk home.
Joachim Trier's romantic dramedy follows Julie, a young Norwegian woman bouncing between ambitions, relationships, and identities as her twenties slip through her fingers. It sounds simple enough, but the opening acts are electric. Sharp, funny, deeply human. There's a restlessness to the early chapters that feels genuinely alive, capturing something true about being young in a world that keeps demanding you define yourself before you've worked out who you actually are. It's not just a coming-of-age story for your twenties. It's a portrait of someone trying to answer questions she isn't ready to answer, and the film is smart enough to know that the inability to answer them isn't a character flaw. It's just being a person.
Renate Reinsve is really good as Julie. Intelligent, impulsive, contradictory, and achingly real. She makes choices that are sometimes baffling, sometimes selfish, always recognisable. You might wince at her, but you never stop rooting for her, and that's a genuinely difficult tightrope to walk.
But the film truly catches fire whenever Anders Danielsen Lie appears. As Aksel, the older cartoonist who becomes Julie's lover, he brings a quiet intensity and warmth that makes every scene feel weightier and more honest. Their relationship is the emotional centre of the film: tender, complicated, and grounded in real stakes. The dinner-table argument, the quiet moments of intimacy, the devastating aftermath of their breakup. Danielsen Lie carries all of it with a rare blend of vulnerability and dignity. He's not just good. He's extraordinary. Where Reinsve captures the beautiful, maddening chaos of being young, Danielsen Lie conveys something harder to articulate: the particular ache of someone who has already done the searching, and arrived somewhere he didn't quite expect. I couldn't take my eyes off him.
If you've seen films like Call Me by Your Name, you'll recognise that quality: the way a great performance can make a love story feel genuinely irreplaceable rather than interchangeable. This has that quality in spades, especially in its middle section.
The film's visual sense is also quietly stunning. The cinematography is alive with colour and spontaneity, from the famous time-freeze sequence through the streets of Oslo to the soft, natural lighting of private moments that feel almost too intimate to be watching. And the soundtrack is a perfect companion, blending melancholy electronica and indie pop into something that feels less like a score and more like memory itself.
But I'd be doing you a disservice if I pretended the whole thing sustains that opening brilliance. It doesn't. The third act, where Julie drifts through new encounters and existential musings, loses some of the narrative drive that made the first half so propulsive. The meandering is intentional, I think, and not without its pleasures, but the film is noticeably less focused in its final stretch. You feel the momentum soften. What began as a sprint becomes something closer to a wander, and while wandering has its charms, you're aware of what you're no longer getting.
Still, even at its least focused, this is a film of real beauty and emotional intelligence. The structure, told in chapters with a dryly narrated prologue and epilogue, gives it a literary quality that suits the material. It's a film that trusts you to sit with discomfort, to accept that its protagonist might not grow in the ways you expect, or want. That's a braver choice than it looks.
Four stars. Not quite the five-star film I thought I was watching at the halfway mark, and I'll admit that gap between expectation and delivery stings a little. But as a whole, this is a modern, deeply felt piece of work about love, ambition, and the search for self. Unforgettable in places. And Anders Danielsen Lie is an absolute revelation.
Norway delivering the goods on the A-Z World Movie Tour. Happily recommended.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2021 | Watched: 2025-08-07
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: MUBI · MUBI Amazon Channel · Channel 4 Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Norway: Dead Snow (2009) · The Family (2017) · No Other Land (2024) · One Love (2003)
More from the 2020s: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · The Long Walk (2025) · Americana (2023)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
More romance: The Eagle (1925) · The Last Picture Show (1971) · The General (1926) · The Docks of New York (1928)
