For his latest film, Joachim Trier is playing it straight.

In his career to date, the Danish-Norwegian director has often pivoted between realism and moments where irony and the surreal puncture the everyday. Think of the dream-like narrative in his debut Reprise (2006) where the lives of two aspiring Oslo writers are told via jump-cut flash-forwards and imagined futures that undercut his characters’ youthful ambitions; of Thelma (2017) , a sexual coming-of-age tale where a devout young woman’s suppressed desire manifests as telekinetic powers; or of the transcendent moment of cinematic magic in The Worst Person in the World (2021) , when time stops as our heroine Julie ( Renate Reinsve ) runs through Oslo, past the city’s frozen citizens, in her escape from her ex-lov

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