Age seems to be slowing me down lately, and I'm only coming to grips with that fact. I haven't written as freely or as often compared to five years ago, and the days between reviews are getting longer and longer. In my case (and, I'd bet, in the case of many around my age,) it's less a fear of missing out than it is a fear of getting left behind.
This restlessness manifests itself in Julie (Renate Reinsve, in one of 2021's best performances), a medical student in Oslo who changes careers three times (or more) in the span of The Worst Person in the World's first five minutes. She's impulsive, fitful in a sense, imbued with the feeling that she has to find the one thing that defines the rest of her life, unaware that the search itself will become the rest of her life if she's not careful.
The rest of the film follows Julie as she flits from place to place and from relationship to relationship, though two stick out: Aksel, a cartoonist who brings the promise of stability, and Eivind, a barista who brings the promise of something new and adventurous. Much like Eivind's first meeting with Julie, where they experiment with the idea of being intimate while not technically cheating on their respective partners, Julie's own life is about getting into something and testing it until it breaks in some way.
But that's part of what life is: figuring things out, often with great difficulty, pain, and crushing regret, until something sticks. Regret is the biggest thing here, and is reflected in the film's title: if you still live your life with such abandon while time moves forward, the world decays and people die, does that make you a bad person, even the worst person in the world? No, it does not. You cannot be everywhere at once and live all your lives in the span of one. For Julie, and in fact, for all of us, that one life that you do end up living is what ultimately matters.
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