First, Anders Danielsen Lie plays key characters in all three. Reinsve has already received the award for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival despite deciding to quit acting the day before she received the role. This time, Trier co-wrote The Worst Person in the World with screenwriter and director Eskil Vogt to evoke self-love and self-acceptance.
While Julie initially seeks to become a doctor and then a psychologist, a photographer, and a writer , her professional ambitions and goals are put on the back burner in order to pursue romance instead.
Each stage of her life is defined by the men she becomes entangled with, from a psychology professor to a fashion model. When her hook up with graphic novelist Aksel turns into a relationship over the course of a night, Julie immediately moves in with her new lover.
In this way, Julie demonstrates her inability to occupy a physical space in the world entirely her own. Their disagreement escalates until Aksel ends up making comments that jeopardize his reputation, but Julie seems more concerned about Aksel than the woman he indirectly called a whore. Soon, she finds out he has incurable cancer, so his flaws go uninterrogated by both the screenwriters and the audience for the sake of sympathizing with his plight.
The two reminisce on their time together, which viewers soon realize they know next to nothing about despite sitting through almost two hours of it. Even the way their breakup occurs, with a narrator speaking over their dialogue, creates a feeling of distance between the viewer and the couple, with their real thoughts and emotions essentially reduced by a voiceover akin to the Google translator voice.
