Renate Reinsve

Two officials sit at a kitchen table with notebooks, and Renate Reinsve's face slowly works out that everything said at that table will be read later by someone who was not there. That is the scene in Fjord (2026) we keep coming back to, and nothing happens in it. We were frightened anyway, and the fright was hers: the pause before she answers, and what we could see arriving in it. It is the thing she does that most actors do not. She lets the thought land before the character has decided what to do about it, and she makes us watch.

She trained at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and spent years in Norwegian theatre, with one small screen part for Joachim Trier in 2011. She was close to giving up when Trier wrote Julie in The Worst Person in the World (2021) for her. Julie is a searching, undecided young woman, and the film made Reinsve's name abroad. Not everyone was charmed; some critics found Julie a familiar sort of messy young woman seen through a man's eye. Her own line on the part, "I wanted her to be strong in the chaos", is a fair description of most of what she has done since. Then came an English-language stretch in 2024, A Different Man opposite Sebastian Stan, Armand, and Presumed Innocent for television, before she went back to Trier.

Sentimental Value (2025), written with Eskil Vogt and shot by Kasper Tuxen, is the best use of her we have reviewed. Nora is a stage actress with a temper she keeps just below the surface, and the strong scenes, a dinner, a phone call, a rehearsal she should not have agreed to, are all about whether it will come up. Trier and Vogt write her the same scene over and over, a room in which she has not yet said the thing, and she does not play it the same way twice. Cristian Mungiu got the same out of her in Fjord, in three languages, none of which she seems to be acting. Stan is her husband there, and their scenes are the reason to go.

Backrooms (2026) asks for something else. Mary is brittle and quick and cannot stand still, and the film keeps cutting away to her as a child. There is one clever shot in those flashbacks, a room rearranging itself as she tries to remember it, and it is the best thing in the picture, but the part wants speed from an actress whose gift is waiting. Set beside Chiwetel Ejiofor, who does his acting with his shoulders, she looks hurried.

The pause needs a director willing to hold the shot. Trier holds it. Mungiu holds it for 146 minutes, which is a little too long. If the English-language films want the actress they saw in The Worst Person in the World, they will have to stop cutting away.