I’m just back from seeing The Worst Person in the World, an Oscar-nominated Norwegian romantic drama starring Renate Reinsve, as our heroine Julie, and Anders Danielsen Lie as Aksel, her cartoon drawing lover. Directed by Joachim Trier and elegantly shot by Kasper Tuxen, it’s an art-house film with sub-titles.

Trier has produced a wistful meditation on adult life, motherhood, modern family relationships, faltering careers, fidelity, mortality and sex, and it wrestles at the end with a heated debate about whether an artist should be allowed to offend. TWPITW covers four years in Julie’s life, but is also “about” very many other different things, episodically imparted though 12 chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue. Bridging these chapters, cinematographer Tuxen keeps our gaze fixed on the sunsets across Oslo, or settles for long minutes on the wonderful Reinsvre, who is captivating throughout, even when just sat silently, thinking, looking a bit sad, and yet hopeful. She does that a lot, as it’s an art-house film with sub-titles.

The last time I was in the cinema, it was to see Spiderman - No Way Home, which was about a new version of Spiderman, self-referencing some other recent Spiderman movies. I won't necessarily endorse Martin Scorsese’s claim that superhero films “aren’t real movies”, as I love a multi-plex SFX heavy blow ‘em up spectacle as the next guy, but he does have a point. Movies can also be art as well as entertainment. At one point, Julie and her dying ex-lover talk about the movies they could watch time and time again; “David Lynch, The Godfather II…Dog Day Afternoon?” In art-house movies, the characters are suitably absorbed and ennobled by watching, reading and consuming others’ art, not binge-watching a box set.

At various points Trier goes on a cinematic homage to others. A photo montage sequence of mothers, accompanied by plaintive music reminded me of the best moments of British director Stephen Poliakoff. Films like Perfect Strangers, or Shooting The Past (for me, mesmeric TV movies that have never been bettered in the subsequent twenty years). When Julie leaves her lover, she flicks a switch that freezes the residents of Oslo in time, as she skips through the streets to kiss a charming Barista; as romantic and as fanciful as Terry Gilliam’s Grand Central sequence in The Fisher King. Less successful is an over-wrought scene of a drug-fuelled hallucination, but Trier redeems himself throughout with an idiosyncratic soundtrack to counterpoint the story, using dozens of artists including retro throw-backs like Christopher Cross, Billie Holiday and Art Garfunkel.

The film in ‘12 Chapters’ approach seemed unnecessary, though just this week there is a literary reminder that auteur’s like the artifice and the discipline of such structures, with Julian Barnes publishing a new novel. Memorably, Barnes’ The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, remains one of the few books I have read more than once and then loved it more the second time. Barnes’ early novels are the literary equivalent of the art-house flick, without subtitles, and I am sure his books would not be out of place on Aksel’s well-stocked shelves.

In a world where the online box-set and endless streams of mindless content dominate producers’ slates, it is a joy to see something like TWPITW actually get made. With enough imaginative backers, creative film makers can still produce thought provoking, memorable storytelling that moves you enough to immediately hit the keys and share a recommendation with others. It’s an art-house film with sub-titles worth seeing.