THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (2021) by Joachim Trier

Just a heads up that we'll be meeting at the William's Cafe located at 33 University Ave. E in Waterloo (instead of the usual Red Brick Cafe) to give fellow GFSers Barry and Laurie a break from the trek to Guelph! Please disregard the incorrect address in the listed location: Meetup doesn't have the University Ave location as an option. If anyone wants to carpool feel free to talk amongst yourselves in the comments or in the WhatsApp group!

“Blending melancholy wistfulness with unruly energy and piercing humour, it’s a down-to-earth tale of love and death, boosted by a brilliantly believable central performance and elevated by fantastical moments of hallucinogenic horror and ecstatic joy.” - Mark Kermode

“Each chapter in The Worst Person in the World feels like a complete, unique thought encapsulating something real in unrealistic visual terms—like the tracks on an eclectic album, which even if they vary in tone comprise a cohesive whole.” - Carlos Aguilar, RogerEbert.com

“The Worst Person in the World is so deft at mining the truth from every cliche about life, romance and death. It leaves you with an ache of recognition, the soft pain of an old bruise.” – Glen Weldon, NPR

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[Peter] How could this young lass possibly be the worst person in the world? I mean if your competition is Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un (to name but two unhinged world leaders), you’d have to be pretty diabolical to even make it onto the shortlist. As it turns out, the movie title is borrowed from a popular Norwegian self-referential expression; “I’m the worst person in the world” would be the equivalent of us North Americans saying “I’m such an idiot” when contemplating one of our many ill-advised life choices. This movie gives the titular character plenty of opportunities for self-deprecation, as she begins to navigate her thirties while wondering if she is really any good at this “adulting” thing. Luckily, Joachim Trier is pretty good at this “filmmaking” thing, and he (along with scriptwriter and partner-in-crime Eskil Vogt) combine the technical wizardry that
was on display in THELMA with the complex, multifaceted character development that underpinned LOUDER THAN BOMBS, to deliver a tour de force of a millennial coming-of-age odyssey. (And there’s even a bonus “trip” as an homage to the GFS Psychedelic Summer series.) This film provides a satisfying end to our retrospective of one of the bright talents of modern European cinema. Nyt filmen (Enjoy the movie)!

You can watch THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD on Kanopy.

Happy viewing!