Why The Worst Person in the World challenges and reinforces ageism

Joachim Trier's 2021 Norwegian film The Worst Person in the World arrived carrying the weight of international acclaim, including the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film and the Cannes Best Actress prize for Renate Reinsve. Its twelve-chapter structure treats Julie, a woman drifting through Oslo in her late twenties and early thirties, as a protagonist of romantic and professional uncertainty. The film feels fresh because it centres a female character who is allowed to be ambivalent, sexually agentic, and resistant to tidy resolution, a rarity in mainstream cinema where women of Julie's age are routinely punished for the same qualities.

Yet beneath that freshness lies a quieter story. The film's structure, marketing, and narrative logic all participate in the global economy of youth that the story sometimes claims to question. To watch the film carefully is to notice how its formal ingenuity coexists with ageist assumptions about whose interiority matters, when female desire is taken seriously, and what counts as a satisfying arc for a woman in her thirties.

The mythology of the female coming-of-age

The Worst Person in the World borrows the architecture of the Bildungsroman, the long literary tradition that treats youth as the period of life worth narrating in detail. Julie shifts between medicine, psychology, and photography; she moves between lovers; she tries on identities with the restless energy of someone who believes time is still on her side. The form signals progressiveness because it grants a young woman the same narrative freedom typically reserved for male protagonists in European art cinema.

The cultural obsession with the female coming-of-age is not, however, unique to Scandinavian storytelling. In Sydney's café culture or along Melbourne's laneway bars, conversations among women in their thirties often orbit the same anxiety the film captures: a sense that the window for reinvention and romance is quietly closing. Julie's episodic romantic encounters and abrupt career pivots mirror a broader cultural script in which women's lives are narrated as a countdown rather than an unfolding present. The film is aware of this pattern, sometimes winking at it, but it never fully escapes the gravitational pull of the trope it sets out to interrogate.

How the film frames Julie's age

Trier's camera treats Julie's age with a kind of double consciousness. The film celebrates her uncertainty, presenting her flailing attempts at various careers as evidence of a woman refusing to be pinned down by expectation. Yet her age functions as an implicit deadline. Chapters are marked by relationship shifts, and the visual palette cools as Julie approaches thirty, with quieter frames signalling a kind of settling that reads more like settling-down pressure than genuine maturation.

Reinsve's face is the film's primary text, and Trier's framing lingers on her expressions with the close attention usually reserved for ingénues. This is not incidental. Australian audiences watching the film on Stan or Binge may notice how rarely local productions afford the same sustained attention to women past thirty. When Julie smokes, cries, or laughs alone in her apartment, the film grants her interiority that mainstream cinema often denies women in her age bracket. Yet that very attention is partly what makes the film ageist: by centring Julie's worth in her youthful face, the film inadvertently suggests that this kind of looking is reserved for the young.

When cinema treats women's age as expiration

The Worst Person in the World is, in many ways, a corrective to the expiration-date narratives that dominate Hollywood romantic comedies. Julie is allowed to be unlikeable, indecisive, and sexually agentic without being punished by the narrative in the ways that older heroines often are. The film's final sequence, in which Julie wanders through a fantastical freeze-frame and ultimately chooses a partner, resists the tidy marriage-plot closure that Hollywood imposes on women of any age. In this sense, the film genuinely challenges ageism by refusing to treat Julie's thirties as a fall from grace.

The film's romantic climax quietly reintroduces the very logic it appeared to question. Julie's eventual choice of Aksel, the older comics writer, asks the audience to read her return to him as a return to seriousness, while her affair with the younger Eivind is framed as a delightful but ultimately empty diversion. The implication is that the film knows ageism is harmful, but still cannot help ranking relationships along an axis of maturity that maps onto age. This tension is not a flaw unique to Trier; it reflects a broader cultural inability to imagine women's desires outside the developmental timeline.

Australian parallels in media and law

For Australian viewers, Julie's dilemmas may feel familiar in ways that extend beyond shared millennial anxieties. The country's entertainment pages, from the Sydney Morning Herald's Spectrum section to Melbourne's The Age, continue to dissect women's appearances and relationship histories with a scrutiny that intensifies after thirty. The film's exploration of Julie's shifting identities resonates with Australian women navigating casualised work, rising rents in Brisbane and Perth, and the cultural pressure to have resolved life's big questions by a certain birthday.

Australia's legal framework offers some protection. The Age Discrimination Act 2004 prohibits age-based discrimination in employment and the provision of goods and services, and the Australian Human Rights Commission has documented persistent ageism in industries from media to retail. The Worst Person in the World lands in a cultural marketplace that continues to undervalue women past thirty on screen and behind the camera, even when the law formally insists otherwise. Local productions centring women in their forties and beyond remain concentrated at festivals like the Sydney Film Festival and the Melbourne International Film Festival, rarely crossing into commercial distribution.

Streaming culture and the curation of youth

The film's distribution through international streaming platforms has shaped its reception in ways that reveal the ageist logic of algorithmic culture. On services like Stan, Netflix, and Binge, thumbnails and recommendation rows privilege faces that signal youth and novelty, while older performers are increasingly shunted into "mature" or "classic" categories that subtly mark their work as belonging to a finished era. The Worst Person in the World benefits from this economy, its poster and marketing materials foregrounding Reinsve's wide-eyed gaze.

This curatorial bias has real consequences for Australian audiences, particularly women over forty seeking representation. The platform's logic suggests that Julie's story, set during a brief window of youthful uncertainty, is more urgent or relatable than narratives about women navigating midlife. The film does not invent this hierarchy, but it profits from it, and its critical success depends on a cultural apparatus that still treats youth as the default setting for interesting female protagonists.

Persistent ageist tropes in the film

• The older male artist, Aksel, is granted gravitas partly through his age, while Julie's youth is coded as both attractive and insufficient.
• The younger male lover, Eivind, functions as a recreational pause, suggesting that relationships with younger men are inherently less serious.
• The narrative arc still resolves through romantic choice, treating partnership as the ultimate evidence of adult readiness.
• The film rarely depicts women Julie's age who have already chosen alternative paths, leaving her uncertainty feeling uniquely weighted.

These patterns do not invalidate the film's achievements, but they do suggest that even thoughtful contemporary cinema struggles to imagine women's lives outside the developmental script. For feminist critics, the film is valuable precisely because it makes those limits visible, offering a chance to ask what a truly age-resistant romance would look like.

Alternative narratives that refuse the countdown

• "Nomadland" (2020) treats Frances McDormand's protagonist with sustained dignity, refusing to pathologise her freedom.
• "Gloria" (2013) centres a Chilean woman in her late fifties pursuing pleasure without apologising for her age.
• "The Lost Daughter" (2021) explores motherhood and midlife without resorting to redemptive romance.
• "Lady Bird" (2017) allows its teenage protagonist to remain unresolved at the end, a small break from the genre's habit of forcing closure.

For readers who want to put The Worst Person in the World in dialogue with earlier writing, the SCREAMING IN ALL CAPS archives collect years of feminist criticism on media, gender, and screen representation.

The film's contradictions matter because ageism in cinema does not operate through villainy but through the casual arrangement of scenes, casting, and narrative resolution. Watching Julie with attention to the moments where the film slips into familiar patterns reveals how even progressive art can inherit the assumptions it seeks to dismantle. Subscribe to the newsletter, support feminist film criticism, and seek out the Australian and international films that centre women whose lives have not ended at thirty, because the stories we tell about age shape the lives we are allowed to live.