Time stops for love in the first trail­er for The Worst Per­son in the World

One of the break­out suc­cess­es from this year’s Cannes Film Fes­ti­val was The Worst Per­son in the World, the lat­est film from Norway’s Joachim Tri­er. The reviews were glow­ing across the board, star Renate Reinsve took home the Best Actress prize, and dis­tri­b­u­tion deals for the UK and North Amer­i­ca quick­ly followed.

Today, every­one can get a glimpse of what all the fuss is about with the first trail­er for the down­beat romance, post­ed online this after­noon. To the sounds of the all-too-apro­pos ​“I Said Good­bye to Me” by Har­ry Nils­son, we meet the pas­sion­ate yet rud­der­less Julie and the two men between whom she’s torn.

The third part in Trier’s so-called ​“Oslo Tril­o­gy,” the film chron­i­cles the quar­ter-life cri­sis send­ing Julie from the arms of her boyfriend Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) into the embrace of the entic­ing Eivind (Her­bert Nor­drum), her roman­tic ambiva­lence in sync with her aim­less career path. Divid­ed between the men, each chal­leng­ing in their own unique­ly hand­some way, she’s like­wise divid­ed between ver­sions of her­self, unsure what she wants to do or who she wants to be.

At Cannes, our woman on the scene Han­nah Strong had plen­ty of pos­i­tive things to say about the dra­ma in her review: “…there’s a truth behind every pithy utter­ance which feels nov­el, and when the script veers toward heartache it hits hard­er for how much we’ve come to care for the three odd­balls at the film’s cen­tre. It’s ear­ly days at Cannes 2021, but The Worst Per­son in the World already feels like a future clas­sic, and Renate Reinsve is hope­ful­ly a star on the rise.”

NEON acquired the film for the US and MUBI will release it in the UK, but nei­ther out­fit has set a date as of yet. The film being Norway’s odds-on sub­mis­sion for the Acad­e­my Award, a late-in-the-year run to coin­cide with that cam­paign is all but assured.