The world has probably always been a place full of attention-seeking people, real attention whores who tried in various ways to draw attention to themselves even though they did not deserve that attention in any way. Today, we live in a time when, thanks to tabloids, especially social networks, we unfortunately know about the existence of multicellular organisms called humans, the existence of which a normal person would neither want nor need to know. A normal person has to vomit when he sees all those morons, whores and scumbags who are closely followed, but in fact no one is clear about who they are and what they really do.
Kristoffer Borgli, a feature film debutant from Norway, presented a brutal black comedy / satire about one such person in the Different View section of the Cannes festival. “Sick of Myself” or “Syk pike” in the original is a really extreme, even excessively caricatured film about a girl who will try and succeed in grabbing attention in a bizarre and crazy way. Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and Thomas (Eirik Sæther) are a couple of narcissists from Oslo who are in a rather unhealthy relationship. Although they can’t seem to stand each other, they’re still together, and when Thomas finally reaches his moment of fame as a conceptual artist who makes exhibitions out of furniture stolen from salons, Signe will become envious and try to find a way to outshine him.
This girl works as a waitress and would like to be famous at any cost, and when she reads on the Internet about some Russian drug that can cause a terrible skin disease as a side effect, she will come up with an idea. Signe will begin to limp with these drugs, and after some time the results will come. Her face will be completely distorted and she will turn into a real freak, but thanks to this she will get what she wanted. Everyone will suddenly know about her, and this insecure sociopath who was constantly tormented by being average and not standing out in anything, will get her 15 minutes of fame. She will become a big star from all the front pages and the whole of Norway will know about her story of an unfortunate, young and beautiful girl who was completely disfigured by a mysterious disease practically overnight.
And Borgli pushes this story completely to the extreme, and really “Sick of Myself” is at times not only a tasteless, creepy and disgusting film, but also completely exaggerated, completely caricaturing today’s society, but at the same time it is a fairly accurate caricature of society. A society that actually feeds on sick people like Signe and enjoys exploiting such crazy stories, and once it’s done with them, quickly moves on to similar lunatics. After introducing herself in the better “Ninjababy”, another subversive social critique of a young woman who does not want a child at any cost after becoming pregnant, the excellent young Norwegian actress Kristine Kujath Thorp has another brave role.