What does it mean to be an adult woman today? Is it an age or a stage? Parenthood, a steady partner, a career or a home of one’s own? Julie, the central character in The Worst Person in the World, shimmies through her 20s to arrive at her 30th birthday with none of these. She’s unmoored, restless, fancy-free – a romantic adventurer and the charismatic subject of a story that is traditionally told about men. As Julie herself puts it, lobbing a grenade into a cosy gathering of her older lover’s friends: “I feel like I know everything about male problems. It’s in all the books and movies. Where’s the menstrual period, orgasm and desire?”
They’re all here, in an existential comedy of metropolitan twentysomething life from the Norwegian director Joachim Trier that has had Hollywood royalty queuing up to pay homage. “It’s so brilliant and it wrecked me. I was crying in a way that was like, weird,” said Dakota Johnson. Jamie Lee Curtis enthused: “This is a marvel of a movie… a deep look inside self-love and what drives us.” But, for all that Barack Obama listed the film among his favourites of 2021, it might all have seemed a little too wafty, a little too hung up on male handwringing, were it not for the transfixing central performance of Renate Reinsve.
