Okristoffer Borgli’s body-horror satire has had some enthusiastic critiques because it premiered at Cannes final 12 months; I discovered the Norwegian movie unsubtle and unrewarding, exhaustingly implausible on a fundamental realist stage, and containing a jarring obviousness which makes its supposed commentary on society and superstar all however worthless.
It does, nonetheless, have a powerful lead efficiency from Kristine Kujath Thorp, who performs Signe, a younger girl in Oslo who’s in an uneasy relationship with Thomas (Eirik Sæther), an insufferably immodest conceptual artist creating sculptures from stolen workplace furnishings. In her peevish and snippy means, Signe is toxically jealous of Thomas’s standing and status; she resents her personal subordinate place of their good friend group as his girlfriend and her humiliatingly lowly job as a espresso store barista. There’s a bizarre echo right here of Joachim Trier’s incomparably superior The Worst Person in the World, and Sick of Myself encompasses a droll cameo from Trier’s key participant, Anders Danielsen Lie.
Signe has no discernible expertise on which to hold her narcissism however, looking the web one afternoon, she has a weird concept: a sure drug has been taken off the marketplace for inflicting horrific pores and skin disfigurements. Signe will get her supplier to obtain a black-market batch which she duly consumes in nice portions, creating stunning welts and scars on her face, and for some time this provides her a sort of grotesque on-line fame. It even eclipses Thomas’s, after Signe is interviewed about what she insists is a freak medical situation whose trigger she doesn’t know. She even will get a modelling job with an company that specialises in difficult body-image conformism. (Is that actually a contemptible factor worthy of satire, by the way?)
However it’s by no means sufficient: different individuals are all the time extra well-known and extra profitable than Signe. Her situation will get worse, and he or she has sacrificed her pure magnificence for nothing. The ethical lesson about on-line narcissism and envy is evident sufficient, and the frisson of despair is current, though there’s something strident and clumsy in the way in which it’s executed.
