It's very real, but is it any good? The jury's still out, but just a week or so after watching it there's nothing in it that stands out in my memory and I remember feeling at the time that it was all a bit disjointed and didn't know what it wanted to be.

The character of Julie (Renate Reinsve) is wonderful. Reinsve is a beautiful woman, but she plays Julie as relatable and everyday, not like a Hollywood princess, and the script by director Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt does the same as she goes through the trials and tribulations of her romantic and professional lives. At no point does either the story, direction or Reinsve herself play it for laughs or tears, she's just a real person going about a real life.

But it's the life going on that failed to make much of an impact on me. Trier's last film was Thelma , a similar tale about a young woman trying to get her life sorted out amid strange supernatural happenings around her, but it was far more cohesive. Here the supernatural only comes up once, and I found it really jarring.

Julie is in her flat with her boyfriend Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lee, who played the terrifying real life villain Anders Brevik in Paul Greengrass' July 22) when everything suddenly freezes.

She leaves her flat and goes running out into the city of Oslo where everything and everyone else around her has similarly frozen, finding Elvind (Herbert Nordrum), the man she thinks she wants to be with instead who she met when she crashed a wedding reception, and spending the afternoon sitting with him on a park bench and dreaming that they could be together.

It's the only instance of something magical happening, it's gone just as quickly and I felt confused about why it had even been there at all.

To relate the plot almost feels unnecessary because everything that actually goes on is so perfunctory on the surface. It's more a bunch of scenes and motifs that are barely connected.

Julie falls in love with Aksel, a comic book artist much older than her. While they're together she instead falls in love with Elvind, a barista who's already in a relationship.

She can't seem to decide what she wants to do with her life, transferring her studies early on from medicine to psychology to photography and then finding a following writing, when a story she posts about feminism and oral sex goes viral. She, Elvind and a bunch of friends take magic mushrooms at a dinner party and we see it from inside Julia's hallucinogenic point of view.

Her relationship with her father is strained, he constantly making excuses for not coming to visit her, a subplot that seems to reveal that he just doesn't really like her much even though it's never established why or drawn to much of a conclusion. When she's with Elvind she reconnects with Aksel after she learns he's dying of cancer, and she also discovers she's pregnant and is terrified about whether to keep the baby or not.

Even aside from the above the story goes in some far flung directions that didn't seem to belong, making it feel like they were just trying to fill the script up with anything they could think up to fill the running time. Elvind's former girlfriend becomes a militant eco-activist. Aksel has a diatribe about how frightened he is to die and how he never stopped loving her. I found myself asking too many times why I should care.

Something I read about the movie said it was intended to subvert the tropes of romantic comedies, and I didn't get that at all. There was no comedy to speak of, and a lack of focus isn't subversion. The story has a peculiar property of staying on Julie and making it about her... until it's not, and when you just want to get back to Julie, it's just her living her everyday life again. It felt like a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

I know that with a different approach or tone you'd feel everything Julie feels and empathise with her completely – that's what stories on film do if they're creatively successful – but I just felt like I was watching it, not living it, and from the sidelines, none of it was very interesting.

At one point Julie says she feels like a spectator in her own life, so maybe Trier is actually a genius, knowing exactly what he was doing, the lack of focus completely on purpose so you'd feel like Julie does in the story. But it doesn't change the fact that I didn't enjoy it while I was watching it. I wish I'd got the same thing out of it I've read in the almost universally fawning reviews.