The Worst Person in the World — The Luxury of Not Deciding

The city only looks frozen because nobody asked the people in it whether they agreed to wait.

Julie flips a light switch in the apartment she shares with Aksel, and Oslo stops. Pedestrians hang mid-stride. Coffee pauses in its pour. The whole city goes still so one woman can run, at golden hour, across town to the man she is not supposed to want, kiss him in daylight that belongs to no calendar, and run home before the world starts breathing again. Kasper Tuxen shoots the run as pure exhilaration, and Joachim Trier means every joule of it. The film never once laughs at Julie’s joy. I want to be clear about that, because everything the movie does afterward depends on how honestly it loves this moment first.

Then, later, the sequence turns its second face toward you. Every person in those frames is standing still because, in Julie’s private cosmology, other people are always standing still. Their time does not run while she decides. The Worst Person in the World is a romantic comedy built on that flattering, poisonous fantasy, and across twelve chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue, it totals up, gently and then not gently, what the fantasy costs everyone who loves a person who is still deciding. That is the whole picture in one image: a city on pause, and a bill quietly running underneath it.

Renate Reinsve won the acting prize at Cannes for this, and you can see what the jury saw inside of ten minutes, because the movie does not exist without her. In the brisk comic prologue Julie burns through medicine, then psychology, then photography, each pivot narrated with the serene confidence of a woman mistaking restlessness for growth. Reinsve plays every stage of it straight, no wink, no irony, and that choice is the performance’s genius. Julie is not a stand-in for a generation. She is one specific, intelligent woman who experiences her own life as a draft she is perpetually about to revise. Watch Reinsve’s face across a single scene: love, boredom, panic, resolve, each conviction fully meant while it lasts, and each one expiring in real time, right there, where you can see it go. The title is Julie’s own verdict on herself, spoken half as confession and half as shield, and the film’s compassion is that it never fully signs off on the verdict and never fully waves it away either.

The ballast is Anders Danielsen Lie as Aksel, the older comic-book artist whose certainty about his own life, his work, his love, his wanting children, is the first thing that draws Julie in and the first thing she cannot survive. Trier’s chapter design is deceptively cruel here. The chapters hand Julie all of the film’s motion, but they hand Aksel all of its gravity, and when illness arrives in the final movement, Lie delivers the monologue the entire movie has been saving up for. Dying, he takes inventory of what he loved. Record shops. The physical culture of objects. A world that existed as things you could hold in your hands and pass to someone you loved, and his grief that all of it dissolved into gestures on a screen. It is the best scene of its year, a man mourning not his life but the texture of his life, and it converts everything that came before it. Julie’s freedom to keep choosing stands revealed as a solvent, eating away at exactly the accumulations, the years, the rooms, the shared objects, that Aksel is dying grateful for. The film does not say she was wrong to leave him. It says the meter was running the whole time, which is worse.

Where the movie falls short of its own reach is structural: the triangle is missing a side. Herbert Nordrum’s Eivind, the barista Julie freezes the city for, is written as a deliberate blank, kind, easy, ambitionless, and I can read the design. He is not a rival life; he is the absence of a decision. But the chapters that rest on him sag where the Aksel chapters grip, and the film’s middle stretch, including an essayistic detour or two, coasts on charm while it waits for its gravity to come back. A movie this precise about time spends a little too much of ours proving that Eivind is not worth Julie’s.

The epilogue settles the account with terrible quietness. Julie, alone now, working as a set photographer, shoots an actress playing a scene, then watches through a window as the actress, wrapped for the day, greets a partner and a child and drives off into the life Julie just photographed her pretending to have. Julie turns back to her screens and edits, alone in the flat, unforgiving light of a profession finally chosen, and Trier just holds there. No punishment. No redemption. A woman at the far end of her decade of options, in the one frame of the film that no longer has anywhere else it is about to go. Some viewers will read peace into it, and the film permits that reading. What it insists on is smaller and harder: that indecision is itself a decision, made daily, compounding, and that the freedom to become anyone gets paid for in the currency of everyone you almost were. The title was never quite ironic and never quite true. She is not the worst person in the world. She is the person the world stopped waiting for, which this film argues, with more love than judgment, is the ordinary tragedy of being thirty.