Joachim Trier
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The mix of supernatural powers and Christian devotion is a bit reminiscent of Stephen King’s “Carrie,” and Trier’s control of the story’s tension is as strong as anything in Brian De Palma’s repertoire.
Joachim Trier’s unexpected foray into genre territory recalls the films of M. Night Shyamalan and Brian De Palma’s Carrie, giving the tale of a girl with weird powers an icy Scandinavian mood and a slow-going pace which feels like a walk in deep snow.
Thelma, like Stephen King’s Carrie, has some kind of power, and it appears to be in the same medical family as that Twilight Zone episode about the kid who could wish people into the cornfield.
Many critics have already compared Thelma to Carrie – the eponymous telekinetic ball of raging hormones from Stephen King’s first smash novel.
Centered on a late-blooming, home-schooled college freshman, Thelma delivers uncanny echoes of Brian de Palma’s 1976 coming-of-age horror film Carrie with finesse.
Brian De Palma's Carrie echoes through this Norwegian psychological thriller, which is subtler and more daring than its model.
“Sentimental Value” is more realistic and nuanced than the glossy “Jay Kelly” (2025) or primal pre-Raphaelite “Hamnet” (2025) while somehow being more optimistic.
A treacly character study of a movie star facing up to his status as an absent father due to spending most of his daughters’ lives on a film set (Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly) feels of a piece with a more tragic tale of art and family like Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet…
Along with “Sentimental Value” (2025) and “Hamnet” (2025), “Jay Kelly” tries to cultivate a film about a father wanting to retain his status as a priority…
Baumbach’s latest is made even worse if and when you finally watch Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, which not only handles the film industry and being actor better than Jay Kelly, but also in handling the dysfunctional relationship between a man and his two adult daughters, who he mostly ignored to focus on his career.
Recent films, from last year’s A Different Man to this year’s Sentimental Value and Is This Thing On?, have all pondered similar questions.
There are times when you can see this fitting easier into an foreign/arthouse vibe (and, from what I’ve heard, this year’s Sentimental Value is that movie, although I have yet to see it)…
Annie Hall (1977)
Directed by Woody Allen
influenced The Worst Person in the World (2021)
Themes Plot Visuals
Though of a piece with Trier’s loosely associated “Oslo Trilogy”— Reprise and Oslo, August 31st are the others, all three starring the superb Anders Danielsen Lie—the film plays like a savvy deconstruction of Annie Hall or similarly literate romantic comedies.
There are opaque shades of Woody Allen’s best work, from Annie Hall to Hannah and Her Sisters .
One of the models here, I suspect, is “Annie Hall” (1977), which Trier placed at No. 3 in his roster of favorite movies, when quizzed by Sight & Sound in 2012.
The same could be said for the story of The Worst Person in the World , which owes as much to Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) as 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963) and When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989).
She is a thoroughly modern woman and doesn't need to dress up like Annie Hall.
At the risk of offending Scandinavian readers by conflating two distinct nations, this Norwegian film reminded me quite a bit of the Swedish picture Let The Right One In, which is a very high compliment indeed.
( Let The Right One In , a cousin of coming-of-age horror, also leaps to mind, though that’s also because this film, like that one, contains some terrible fire effects.)
It also confidently updates and builds on the modern-day, minimalist conventions of Let the Right One In and Goodnight Mommy .
Thelma does indeed look quite a bit like the most famous Scandinavian horror/romance film American audiences are likely to be familiar with: Let the Right One In.
See Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet for another example of exactly that.
“Sentimental Value” is more realistic and nuanced than the glossy “Jay Kelly” (2025) or primal pre-Raphaelite “Hamnet” (2025) while somehow being more optimistic.
…feels of a piece with a more tragic tale of art and family like Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet…
This festival (Best Director, Karlovy Vary; Discovery Award, Toronto) and Norwegian film awards winner owes more than a nod to Tom Tykwer's fate-bending fairy tale, "Run Lola Run," with its narrated 'what if' and flight of fancy' scenarios which continually spin off the main action.
While borrowing repeatedly from the best of Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet ("Le Fabuleux Destin d'Am�(c)lie Poulain") and the Germanic Tom Tykwer ("Run, Lola, Run"), Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier has nevertheless fashioned a most promising first feature with the art house "Reprise."
Frances Ha (2013)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
influenced The Worst Person in the World (2021)
Themes Visuals
It is almost a decade since Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha graced our screens and became a cinematic touchstone of existentialism for women in their 20s.
But this isn’t simply the Norwegian “Frances Ha,” which is not at all a dig.
There are shades of Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha,” and indeed, Julie’s sprint down central Oslo radiates the same level of euphoria as Greta Gerwig’s run across New York City set to David Bowie.
Trier tells Thelma’s story primarily through images, rather than words – and what haunting images they are, reminiscent of such classic, freaky fantasias as Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Lynch’s Eraserhead .
Materialists (2025)
Directed by Celine Song
influenced by The Worst Person in the World (2021)
Themes Music
Sounds trite, but think of a story cut in the same cloth as recent offerings like Joachim Trier’s Norwegian quarter-life crisis drama The Worst Person in the World…
Perhaps taking a cue from Joachim Trier's inspired use of Harry Nilsson on the soundtrack of another not-quite-rom-com, The Worst Person in the World, Song plays out those honeymoon-phase scenes to “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City,” one of a handful of choice needle-drops.
Trier tells Thelma’s story primarily through images, rather than words – and what haunting images they are, reminiscent of such classic, freaky fantasias as Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Lynch’s Eraserhead .
Broadly, this is a coming-of-age movie in the Diner mold: Trier tracks Phillip and Erik and a few of their pals as they stagger into a world that can’t be attuned to their (male adolescent) expectationsespecially in regard to women.
Slightly less cinematically obsessive viewers, however, might see this as a fairly arty, literary, more sensitive punk rock take on “Diner” and possibly even “ Swingers ,” with a generous de-heroined dash of “Trainspotting” and a gimmick or two on loan from “ Run, Lola, Run .”
"His gaze made her feel pretty," intones the narrator, in a voice of bruised longing reminiscent of French New Wave films like "Jules and Jim."
A coming-of-age tale featuring an interconnected, if not incestuous group of young, creative people trying to make their mark, the film will remind arthouse veterans of Fellini’s “I Vitelloni,” a 1953 semi-autobiographical, archetypal, young-male-coming-of-age film about a half-dozen developmentally arrested, small-town Italian layabouts in search of adulthood.
…some overt references to Ingmar Bergman – especially when the faces of the father and his two daughters morph into each other at one point…
…she suffers from crippling bouts of stage fright (just like the heroine of Bergman’s Persona)…
Fritz the Cat (1972)
Directed by Ralph Bakshi
influenced The Worst Person in the World (2021)
Visuals
He’s a 44-year-old underground comix artist (and apparently a big fan of Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat ).
Her life begins to take on some stability when she falls in love with fortysomething Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), the creator of a Fritz the Cat -style series of comic books.
The Big Chill (1983)
Directed by Lawrence Kasdan
influenced The Worst Person in the World (2021)
Themes
This conception isn’t entirely wrong, of course, but it belies the fact that the oldest members of the cohort are hurtling toward something which looks an awful lot like middle age; I recently realized, with no small amount of horror, that I am now older than most of the characters in The Big Chill.
Julie’s restlessness makes her a love/hate fascination; the film may speak to millennials much like “The Big Chill” did to boomers and “Reality Bites” to Gen-Xers.
…comical, ominous classical music cues that most audiences will recognize from The Shining…
…the portentous opening notes of The Shining’s main title theme…
An Unmarried Woman (1978)
Directed by Paul Mazursky
influenced The Worst Person in the World (2021)
Themes
Watching The Worst Person in the World , my mind traipsed toward another coming-of-age film: the 1978 Paul Mazursky–helmed classic An Unmarried Woman .
Set to release theatrically in its native Finland in February, Hatching could also do well further afield, particularly with fans of Scandi-genre fare like Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In (2008), Joachim Trier’s Thelma (2017)— with which it shares themes of powerful pubescent emotion — and Ali Abbasi’s Border (2018), which won Cannes Un Certain Regard in 2018.
…which is “Sentimental Value” (2025) levels of unknowing intuition about their connection.