About The Worst Person in the World
Julie is about to turn thirty in Oslo and hasn’t decided what she wants to be when she grows up. Across twelve chapters Joachim Trier follows her through medical school, a graphic-novelist boyfriend, a barista she meets at a wedding she crashed, and the magic-realist set piece in which the world freezes mid-jog so she can sprint across the city. Renate Reinsve won Cannes for a performance built almost entirely out of sideways glances and second thoughts.
Released in 2021 and running a tight 2h 08m, The Worst Person in the World sits firmly in the comedy tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated R and presented in Norwegian, with English subtitles at participating venues.
Director: Joachim Trier
Joachim Trier belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. The Worst Person in the World is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Joachim Trier currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow festival-circuit coverage from the outlets that track independent distribution.
Cast
The principal cast — Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception.
Where to watch The Worst Person in the World
Our seasonal catalog — an editorial sample of the circuit, not a live ticketing feed — places it at independent cinemas in 12 US cities. Coverage is deepest in:
- Los Angeles, CA — listed at 4 independent cinemas.
- New York, NY — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Santa Cruz, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Leesburg, VA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Big Bear Lake, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- York, PA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Seymour, IN — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Brooklyn, NY — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Winchester, KY — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Bryn Mawr, PA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Woodstock, NY — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Sikeston, MO — listed at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. The Worst Person in the World is a clean fit for that model: a 2h 08m comedy work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas in the cities listed above are the venues doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Comedy genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition.