All good film is probably about balance in some sense, but it takes a particularly special work of cinema to strike the balance at the heart of The Worst Person in the World. The last installment of Joachim Trier’s loose “Oslo Trilogy” — which also includes Reprise (2006) and Oslo, August 31st (2011) — is connected to its predecessors mostly by the city of Oslo and a few recurring actors, rather than being linked in story or character. But the comedic youthfulness of Part 1 and the dramatic maturity of Part 2 dovetail beautifully here in Part 3, so perhaps that’s the real connective tissue. The Worst Person in the World has moments of genuine hilarity and moments of crushing sadness, but it never slips off that tonal tightrope between the two.
At the start, we’re pretty firmly in romantic comedy territory. Julie (Renate Reinsve) is a young medical student without much passion in her life, so she jettisons her designs on becoming a doctor and decides psychology is more her thing; it’s easier to be passionate about the mind than about the body, after all. She meets a guy and they hook up, and Julie then decides that photography, actually, is a better career fit. She buys camera equipment, takes portraits for a male model, and then hooks up with him. They’re at a bar in the next scene when Julie meets another guy, Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a moderately-famous cartoonist, and before the movie actually really begins Julie and Aksel are together for what feels like the long haul.
Motion State Review 