Review: The Worst Person in the World and the “End of All Strain”

(Title comes from the last line of the song that plays over the credits: Art Garfunkel's cover of Antônio Carlos Jobim's "Waters of March".)

BY PHUC NGO ‘23

Many films succeed because they unashamedly present themselves as fiction. Realism is deprioritised in service of emotion, and with that emotionality, the film buys itself some credibility, some suspension of disbelief from the audience. Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express is a magnificent example of this type of film. Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World is not.

The Worst Person in the World is a film firmly set in reality. Its protagonist, Julie, starts the film as a directionally challenged medical student in 2010s Øslo, and the story centres around her finding herself as she moves through two significant relationships in her life.

As the first two acts unfold, it becomes clear that the film is built on (and succeeds thanks to) an astounding sense of realism. Julie’s struggles are real and, crucially, relatable: a yearning for meaning, a fear of abandonment, a general anxiety about kids. Renate Reinsve does an outstanding job melding these traits into an authentic corporeal form, someone distinct and individual yet still highly empathisable. She’s helped too by the plot, which ebbs and flows naturally, the script, whose lifelike dialogue and narration compounds Julie’s identity dilemma, and the cinematography, whose neutral colours (the only vibrant shade that features prominently is green – the colour of nature) give the film a realistic feel. The Worst Person in the World, at least its first two thirds, is portraiture in its highest forms.

Now, I don’t mean to say that the film, in its realism, doesn’t have unrealistic, fantastical elements: at one point, Julie literally hits pause on life and jogs across the city to her love interest Eivind’s work, all while the rest of Øslo, cars and bikes and people alike, stand frozen in time. At another, Julie eats some psychedelic mushrooms and hallucinates taking a bloody tampon out of her vagina and throwing it at her father.

(The image above, the same still used in promotional material for the film, is from the sequence wherein Julie stops time and runs to Eivind.)

These scenes, though fantastical by nature, are simply extensions of the reality of the film. Both scenes exist only in Julie’s mind—in a fantasy and a shroom trip—and thus, they don’t break the film’s reality. Instead, they add to it by giving insight into Julie’s state of mind: her frolic with time showcases her longing for the change and newness that Eivind represents; her shroom-provoked hallucinations are a materialisation of her anxieties on inadequacy and abandonment.

However, as I watched and rewatched the film, its final act has always felt somehow ‘off’ to me. From the moment Julie learns of Aksel’s cancer, the film feels on an altogether different flow.

It’s not that the final act is technically inferior to the first two. Julie’s interactions with Aksel before his death feel intimate and human, and Trier expertly mixes depth and levity, as he does throughout the film. In one scene, they’re spooning on a hospital bed, and Aksel reaches for Julie’s breast. Julie nonchalantly but firmly moves his arm back to its place. In another, Aksel tells Julie: “I don’t want to be a memory for you, I don’t want to be a voice in your head, I don’t want to live on through my art, I want to live in my flat – I want to live in my flat with you.” Anders Danielsen Lie’s performance throughout the film is good, but in this final act, he really shines: Aksel is vulnerable and grieving, resigned to death yet living in denial.

The problem, I think, lies in the plot device used to push the film into its final act. Just prior, Julie had revealed to Eivind that she could be herself around him. He, by and large, ignores her. The natural direction of the story would’ve been to expand on this conflict, yet the plot was torpedoed by the announcement of Aksel’s cancer diagnosis. The otherwise sensible flow of the plot is disrupted. Furthermore, the final act messes with the sense of relatability central to the film: everyone’s fantasised about new love, everyone’s scared of being abandoned, not everyone has had an ex (who’s still very much in love with them) be diagnosed with stage four cancer. In the end, the final act doesn’t seem to resolve anything; it just asks more questions. In effect, it felt like a beautifully crafted short film, an appendix separate from the rest of the film.

Reinsve herself seems to embrace the uncertainty. In an interview with The Guardian, she says: “We asked questions when we made this movie, and I feel we didn’t give any answers. It’s like a big conversation with so many people."

Maybe she's right – doesn’t the insensibility make the film even more naturalistic? Isn’t it reflective of the moments when we finally feel ready to confront a problem in life, but are then overwhelmed by something gigantic that we didn’t see coming? And, what in life ends with a neatly tied bow or a cherry on top? Lack of resolution is a significant theme in the film: Julie never sticks with anything; Aksel dies in the fourth stage of grief. Why, then, do we deserve closure? By this point, hasn’t Julie earnt the right to be her own person? To demand from us sympathy and understanding instead of simple empathy?

(The only thing that seems to get a proper resolution is Julie and Aksel's relationship: they sleep together one last time before she leaves. And then Aksel is diagnosed with cancer...)

I don’t know. In a film that succeeds so much on realism, somehow, its most grounded plot point cracks it. Maybe the problem was priming: I expected realism and relatability, so when I was given shock and specificity, something felt off. Maybe, it would’ve worked in a film less focused on realism. Maybe, I’ll only get it when I’ve crashed a wedding and blown cigarette smoke into someone else’s mouth. Or, maybe, it's just supposed to be janky.