Kristoffer Borgli’s body-horror satire has had some enthusiastic reviews since it premiered at Cannes last year; I found the Norwegian film unsubtle and unrewarding, exhaustingly implausible on a basic realist level, and containing a jarring obviousness which makes its supposed commentary on society and celebrity all but valueless.
It does, however, have a strong lead performance from Kristine Kujath Thorp, who plays Signe, a young woman in Oslo who is in an uneasy relationship with Thomas (Eirik Sæther), an insufferably conceited conceptual artist creating sculptures from stolen office furniture. In her peevish and snippy way, Signe is toxically jealous of Thomas’s status and prestige; she resents her own subordinate position in their friend group as his girlfriend and her humiliatingly lowly job as a coffee shop barista. There is a weird echo here of Joachim Trier’s incomparably superior The Worst Person in the World, and Sick of Myself features a droll cameo from Trier’s key player, Anders Danielsen Lie.
Signe has no discernible talent on which to hang her narcissism but, browsing the internet one afternoon, she has a bizarre idea: a certain drug has been taken off the market for causing horrific skin disfigurements. Signe gets her dealer to procure a black-market batch which she duly consumes in great quantities, creating shocking welts and scars on her face, and for a while this gives her a kind of grotesque online fame. It even eclipses Thomas’s, after Signe is interviewed about what she insists is a freak medical condition whose cause she doesn’t know. She even gets a modelling job with an agency that specialises in challenging body-image conformism. (Is that really a contemptible thing worthy of satire, incidentally?)
But it is never enough: other people are always more famous and more successful than Signe. Her condition gets worse, and she has sacrificed her natural beauty for nothing. The moral lesson about online narcissism and envy is clear enough, and the frisson of despair is present, although there is something strident and clumsy in the way it is executed.
• Sick of Myself is released on 21 April in UK and Irish cinemas.
