The Worst Person in the World

A friend mentioned The Worst Person in the World to me a long time ago when they were going through a rough time and the fallout effect of not quite knowing where to place yourself in the world. When describing the film to me originally, she'd said, almost casually, “Trust me, you’ll love it when you need it. " Well, turns out she was right and I wildly underestimated just how good it would be.

Watching The Worst Person in the World feels less like watching a film and more like sitting quietly with someone who understands exactly what you’re not ready to say out loud yet.

What makes it so affecting isn’t any grand declaration about love or loss, but its subtlety and the fact it never insists on its meaning. Rather, it trusts you to meet it where you are, and in times of turbulence, that trust feels quite disarming and oddly comforting. Julie's indecision, her tenderness, her selfishness, her fear of choosing wrongly: none of it is ever dramatised as failure, it is simply observed. For me, this non-judgemental series of moments felt like a redemptive whisper, saying "this is what being human looks like when no one is watching." Only we get to watch.

How it's shot

The cinematography is STUNNING and mirrors Julie’s inner life with remarkable restraint in that nothing is overstated or engineered to tell you how to feel or who to sympathise with. The camera observes rather than interprets, often keeping a gentle distance that allows scenes to breathe and unfold in real time. Essentially, we’re invited close enough to register Julie's doubt and sadness, but never so close that the film starts speaking on her behalf.

What’s striking to me is how uncertainty itself becomes part of the film’s visual language. It lingers at the edges, drifts slowly into focus, and eventually takes over - not through dramatic shifts, but through accumulation over time. This is how doubt works in real life too: barely noticeable at first, then gradually impossible to ignore.

There's also a sense of balance between space/place and character, external/internal reality that I've not seen in many films before. What I mean by this is that Oslo never defines Julie, but it does hold her and quietly nudges her inner life to shift in ways she barely registers herself. The city doesn’t mirror her emotions directly but actually brushes up against them, creating space for something unspoken to surface.

For instance, there’s a moment after her boyfriend’s book signing when she leaves the event looking outwardly fine. She steps into the early evening, pauses on the roadside, and looks up at the sky where a small orb of pinkish light breaks through the grey-white clouds. It’s not dramatic or symbolic in any obvious way, just a fleeting, almost incidental detail but something about it undoes her. As she keeps walking, we see tears slowly gather in her eyes, not spilling yet, just hovering there. It’s only when she turns back to look again that they finally fall.

The scene captures something the film understands deeply: how emotion doesn’t always arrive through confrontation or words, but through quiet encounters with the world - a colour, a view, a light, a pause - that suddenly make it impossible to keep moving untouched.

Beyond landscape, the film takes place within random streets, apartments, cafés, bedrooms - very ordinary spaces - which are rendered quietly beautiful through light and stillness, so that the place gets as much space to breathe as the characters existing within the space. The camera is also patient, often staying a moment longer after conversations end, as if acknowledging that what matters most often happens in those moments after words run out.

Breakups heighten your awareness of small things - a pause before someone speaks, the weight of silence in a room - and the film is shot with exactly that sensitivity. It understands that emotional rupture is something that is worked towards quietly, existing in the margins and out-of-frame until it eventually reaches the foreground.

The freeze moment (holy shit..)

One of the film’s most memorable moments is when time quite literally stops and it's hard to explain how the film manages to do this without it feeling cliche.

Firstly, I think it lands perfectly because of when it happens. It isn’t triggered by drama or conflict, but by an aggressively ordinary moment in the kitchen, where Julie stands in the doorway while Aksel makes her coffee, explaining something, talking with confidence, occupying space in that comfortable, settled way. Essentially, nothing is evidently wrong, but that's the entire issue.

As she stands there, you can see the realisation dawn upon her: this is it, this is the rhythm, this is the future, these small routines, the certainty, the dull safety of it all. It’s not that he’s cruel or unkind, he isn’t, it’s just she feels herself disappearing inside a life that no longer feels alive to her.

And that's when time stops. Julie steps out of the apartment and runs through Oslo as the world freezes around her. People are caught mid-gesture, coffee cups suspended in the air, traffic stilled, allowing Julie to move freely inside her own desire and towards the man she'd almost cheated on Aksel with. The entire landscape thus becomes an external manifestation of the sudden, intoxicating clarity you get when you realise you want something else, before the weight of consequences sets in.

Though she runs towards Eivind (the object of desire), what’s beautiful about the moment is how unromantic it is at heart, mainly because it isn’t a simple rejection of love in favour of desire, but rather a rejection of inertia and dullness. For me, the scene captures the rare, fleeting feeling of being unencumbered by the expectation to explain yourself or justify your leaving.

And, crucially, it doesn’t last. Time resumes and the world continues. That’s what gives the sequence its serious ache. It understands that these moments of clarity are temporary and that certainty, like doubt, arrives in flashes. But for that brief suspension, the film makes visible something incredibly powerful: the instant you realise that staying would be a quieter kind of heartbreak.

Subtle performances, real pain

Renate Reinsve’s performance is astonishing precisely because it never begs for sympathy - it's no wonder she won awards for it. Julie isn’t written to be likeable in the conventional sense, and that’s the point. After a breakup, it’s easy to cast yourself as either the villain or the victim but the film rejects both these roles and instead, offers complexity. People hurt each other not because they’re cruel, but because they themselves are unfinished, in flux and in the process of working themselves out.

Even the film’s emotional peaks are relatively quiet: a conversation on a bed, a walk through the city, a moment of recognition that arrives too late. These scenes land harder than melodrama ever could because they resemble real life, especially the emotional flatness that follows the end of something meaningful.

The lesson it leaves you with

If there’s a lesson here, it’s not about how to love “correctly.” It’s about timing, honesty, and the uncomfortable truth that growth and gain almost always require loss in some capacity. The film doesn’t punish Julie for not knowing who she is yet. It refuses to frame uncertainty as a flaw, treating it instead as a phase, and suggests that staying too long in the wrong certainty can be its own kind of betrayal.

Due to the complexity it confronts, the film allows space for regret without self-destruction, nostalgia without denial, and love without permanence, and acknowledges that some relationships are meant to end not because they failed, but because they completed their work in your life.

Why it lingers

As expected, the film doesn't resolve anything by it's end and left me with a feeling of being unsettled but also at peace. Like a breakup itself, it doesn’t give answers but does offer a calming clarity that flux is natural, that becoming yourself is not a linear process, and that love, however brief or imperfect, still matters.

The Worst Person in the World understands that heartbreak isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s just the quiet realisation that you’re changing, and that the person you were, and the person you loved, can’t come with you anymore. So really, the The Worst Person in the World is not about being the worst at all, it's about being unfinished and realising that this is a valid way to exist.

Call me sentimental, but I think that's pretty beautiful.