Sundance review: 'The Worst Person in the World' is a touching and funny look at a 20-something trying to make sense of her life

Director Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” arrives in America (both with an Oscar-qualifying run and a slot in the 2022 Sundance Film Festival’s Spotlight section) with a strong tailwind of praise, including a Best Actress win at the Cannes Film Festival for its young star, Renate Reinsve.

I’ll add to the pile of praise: This is a funny and touching comedy-drama, and Reinsve is outstanding as the sorta-title character, who’s not that bad but still figuring things out.

Reinsve’s character, Julie, is 27 and not sure where she’s going in her life. Flashbacks of her college life find her switching her majors from pre-med to psychology to photography — and not fully satisfied in any of them, leaving her to toil in a job at an Oslo bookstore. It’s because of the job that he meets Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie, a frequent Trier collaborator), an abrasive comic-book artist about a decade her senior, and soon they become lovers.

But there’s something missing in the relationship, something Julie can’t quite describe. It’s clear when she leaves Aksel’s book-signing party early, and on her walk home ends up crashing a wedding — where she meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), a nice guy whose personality is the opposite of Aksel’s. The scenes of Julie and Eivind at the wedding, talking and flirting into the morning but never so much as kissing, are heartbreaking in their pure impact.

Trier and his frequent writing partner, Eskil Vogt, send Julie into some visually stunning flights of narrative fancy. In one, she leaves one man for another — with every human between them frozen in time. In another, a dose of hallucinogenic mushrooms has her imagining a reunion with her estranged father, among other wild visions.

Trier — whose output has ranged from addiction drama (“Oslo, August 31st”) to psychological horror (“Thelma”) — and Vogt wrote this film specifically for Reinsve, and it’s a perfect fit. Julie isn’t the worst, though she sometimes does things that make her feel that way, which just makes her human. Reinsve finds the humor and pain of living in those in-between stages of life, when someone thinks their close to figuring it all out, and having the epiphany that nobody ever completely figures it out, but it’s the attempt that makes life interesting and meaningful.

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‘The Worst Person in the World’

★★★1/2

Screened Thursday, January 20, in the Spotlight section of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Saturday, January 22, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. (The film is set to open in Utah theaters on February 18.) Rated R for sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and some language. Running time: 127 minutes; in Norwegian, with subtitles.