THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (2021), Dir. by Joachim Trier

At first glance, the calling cards that define Joachim Trier’s filmography seem typical to the filmmakers of his generational ilk – impressionist-style editing a la Scorsese/Schoonmaker, an iterative fixation on the Jarmusch-esque grifter-protagonist, and as most evidenced by his most recent film, the looming brow of Woody Allen’s affable ANNIE HALL.

The marriage of these influences sounds like a generative AI prompt for a Draft-Class-Hype-Millennial-Filmmaker, but Trier’s ace-in-the-hole is not merely his excellent taste: it’s his sensibility as a writer. In tandem with co-writer Eskil Vogt, Trier’s dialogue constantly plays tricks on the viewer, worthily setting up verbal payoffs in the murky dialect of a confused 30-something-year-old. Balancing melodrama and comedy, the film actually gets away with lines like “Yes, I do love you…And I don’t love you,” by simultaneously reckoning with the banality and the weight of Julie’s identity crisis. Far from easy to make it to the final draft with that, and actually have it work.

My favourite technique leveraged in THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD is the manipulation of sound. From the start of the film, we’re thrust into Julie’s world with swelling ambience that waxes and wanes as her atmosphere changes (the silence she relishes while overlooking Oslo seems to scream louder than an ambitious drug-fuelled sequence later in the film). Backed by a star-studded soundtrack spanning Trier’s 70s-and-80s sensibilities, Oslo, while in reality quite small, comes alive as an expansive playground of sounds. This, by the way, is the perfect backdrop for a Cannes-winning Best Actress performance on the part of Renate Reinsve.

Trier’s style of humanist filmmaking walks a line that the rest of his generation of filmmakers have yet to figure out – it spotlights the internal malaise of a generation feeling left behind without indulging in it to the point of self-pity. It’s empathetic, while realist… which is also a strange way to describe any of his second-gen wealth protagonists, yet feels homely all the same.