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The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier’s tender-to-the-touch new movie, is a sort of adult analog to the coming-of-age film. It follows a young woman named Julie (Renate Reinsve) who moves from her 20s into her 30s in the few years the movie covers. Whereas most coming-of-age films poeticize the young protagonist’s experiences to the point that they feel a little lyrical, almost nostalgic to the touch, the hard truth-telling The Worst Person in the World instead dwells more in the specific brand of existential dread and monotony inherent to early adulthood — an ever-present longing for a vague “something more” that could be within reach or perhaps too nebulous to ever really be satisfactorily attained. 

The Oslo-set The Worst Person in the World is divided into 12 chapters, not counting its prologue and epilogue. In the former, we get a crash course on who exactly Julie is as we’re entering the movie’s first official section. She went to medical school, decided she was actually more interested in the soul than the body, so dropped out for psychology. Then she decided she was actually more visually than psychologically oriented, so pivoted to photography. Around the same time, she got together with a quite famous artist-slash-writer named Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) known for an underground comic Julie finds vaguely sexist. The moment things seemed like they could become more than a fling, Aksel declared that they shouldn’t be together. He’s 44 and wants kids; she’s in her mid-20s and doesn’t. And who knows what other age gap-related problems could show up later on. But he becomes so irresistible to Julie in that moment of attempted stultification that they throw caution to the wind. 

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