A narcissistic young woman takes increasingly desperate measures to
ensure she remains the centre of attention.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Kristoffer Borgli
Starring: Kristine Kujath Thorp, Eirik Sæther, Fanny Vaager, Fredrik Stenberg
Ditlev-Simonsen, Sarah Francesca Brænne, Ingrid Vollan
Takeshi Kushida's recent dark Japanese drama
Woman of the Photographs
told the story of a struggling model who is surprised that a picture she
posts online of scars she received from an accident becomes her most
"liked" post. Fuelled by this discovery, she allows her scars to fester,
posting increasingly disturbing images to an ever-growing audience.
Norwegian writer/director Kristoffer Borgli's
Sick of Myself has an almost identical premise, but here
it's played with the sort of distinctively Scandinavian brand of black
humour we've seen in the films of Ruben Ostlund and Joachim Trier.
Borgli's film is centred on Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp), a
twentysomething narcissist who likes to be the centre of attention but
who finds that space usually occupied by her boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther), a rising star in the world of conceptual art. One afternoon while
working at her bakery job, Signe is shocked to find a bloodied,
hysterical woman rush into the store having been bitten by a dog. Signe
comes to her aid and comforts the woman until an ambulance arrives.
Still in shock, Signe walks home without changing out of her bloodied
clothes, attracting the attention of worried passersby. Arriving home,
the usually inattentive Thomas can't do enough to help her.
This causes a lightbulb to go off in Signe's head as she realises a
surefire way to attract attention is to have people believe you're a
victim of some sort. During a dinner following Thomas's latest
exhibition, Signe lies about having a nut allergy, leading to a
hilarious sequence of situation comedy when the chef spots her eating
from Thomas's plate, forcing Signe to feign a negative reaction. Signe
continues to look for ways to become a victim, like attempting to goad a
dog into biting her, but she strikes gold when she comes across a news
piece about a Russian drug that has been banned for causing extreme
rashes. With the aid of a drug dealing friend, Signe acquires copious
amounts of the illegal pills and starts popping them like Smarties. At
first she comes out in a rash, but after a couple of days her face has
swollen to Elephant Man-esque proportions. With doctors baffled, Signe
finds herself briefly the centre of her nation's attention and even gets
taken on by a modelling agency committed to inclusion. But she becomes
increasingly paranoid that the truth will come out, dogged by nightmares
in which her ruse is revealed.
Played with relish by Thorp, Signe is a fascinating protagonist, a
millennial Larry David on speed. Her quest for attention knows no
bounds, and in one of the film's darkest pieces of black comedy she
throws a tantrum when a mass shooting knocks her interview from the
front page of a national newspaper's website. It doesn't matter that
she's defaced herself seemingly permanently; once she's getting
attention that's all that matters to Signe.
Borgli would appear to be commenting on the recent rise of
self-afflicted victimhood among citizens of the western world, with many
determined to position themselves as downtrodden, whether it's straight
white men claiming everyone else is out to get them or everyone else
claiming straight white men are out to get them. When Signe lies about
her fake nut allergy, she reassures her fellow diners that "I try not to
let it run my life," but a glance at any social media platform will give
you the impression that many (mostly young, white and middle class)
people today seem to define themselves by whatever affliction they might
possess, even if it's something as small as ingrown toenails.
As Signe's condition worsens, the film begins to morph into a
Cronenbergian body-horror, with Thorp resembling Jeff Goldblum in
The Fly as her hair falls out and in one particularly icky
moment, the flesh of her face gets stuck to a table like chewing gum.
Yet the more we worry for Signe's physical deterioration, the more she
laps it up. The trouble for Signe is that the news cycle spins quickly,
and it's not long before she's no longer considered a novelty and her
friends go back to overlooking her. After all, Warhol did say we would
get 15 minutes of fame at most, and with her minutes elapsed, Signe is
left to serve as a sorry-looking cautionary tale of the lengths people
will take to be noticed.
