128 min | R | February 4, 2022 | Neon
Julie is almost thirty and still does not know what she wants to be, who she wants to love, or whether either question has an answer. Joachim Trier follows her through four years of starting over. The film is about the people we abandon to keep becoming someone else.
Julie lives in Oslo and approaches thirty without a fixed sense of who she is. She abandons medicine for psychology, then psychology for photography, then drifts into writing and a bookstore job. She loves Aksel, an older comic artist who wants children and stability. At a party she crashes she meets Eivind, and the life she built starts to feel like a costume. Joachim Trier divides the story into twelve chapters with a prologue and an epilogue. The film is about the people you leave behind in order to keep becoming someone new.
Renate Reinsve plays Julie with restless intelligence and a constant flicker of self-doubt. She makes indecision active. Julie is always reaching for the next version of herself, and Reinsve lets you see the calculation behind the impulse. Anders Danielsen Lie plays Aksel with warmth that hardens into condescension and then breaks open into something far more vulnerable. He is never a villain, which makes Julie’s choices harder to forgive and harder to resent. Herbert Nordrum plays Eivind as the lighter alternative, easy and present and offering nothing to outgrow.
Joachim Trier directs from a script he wrote with Eskil Vogt, and the two build the film around a single audacious sequence. Julie flips a light switch and Oslo freezes mid-motion. She runs through stilled traffic and frozen pedestrians to reach Eivind while the rest of her life holds its breath. The trick works because Trier and Vogt earn it through the chapters that surround it. The structure refuses a clean arc and instead accumulates moments that openly contradict each other. Trier shoots intimacy in long unbroken takes that let a scene breathe and then turn against itself.
This is a portrait of a woman who treats every commitment as a door closing rather than one opening. Trier refuses to judge Julie for it. He understands that the freedom to choose anything is also the fear that any choice is a loss. The title is a joke and an accusation and a confession at once. The film holds her contradictions and never tries to resolve them. Resolving them would lie about what it feels like to be young and free and afraid.