Syk pike
***½/****
starring Kristine Kujath Thorp, Eirik Sæther, Fanny Vaager
written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli
The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.
by Walter Chaw Effectively the Ruben Östlund film that got away, Kristoffer Borgli’s acerbic Sick of Myself (and I can’t say the title without singing it to the tune of the Matthew Sweet anthem of self-loathing) skewers the cult of victimhood that runs parallel to any progressive social awakening, muddying the waters to such an extent that the language of tolerance becomes weaponized, and true gains come clouded with apologies and equivocations. One step forward, 80 years’ worth of steps back. A scene late in Sick of Myself between a poisonous narcissist and the friend and journalist trying to make sense of it all has the malignant party saying they’re the real victim of their own absurd machinations, because, given a choice, no one would ask to be a psychopath. It’s funny because it’s familiar: how self-pity is the easier sensation to bear over shame. And it’s familiar because there isn’t even anything like the illusion of accountability left in this world. The worst of us, given an unprecedented platform to do harm, will never admit to anything like fault or suffer anything like consequences.
Artist/sculptor/petty thief and furniture arranger Thomas (Eirik Sæther) is a fucking asshole. He takes his girlfriend Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) to a ritzy restaurant, orders a €2,300 bottle of wine, then runs off with it after coercing Signe to create a diversion. He boasts about these feats of petty larceny with a braggart’s pride, and as his career begins to gain momentum on the back of his hipster novelty, he pays less and less attention to Signe. Signe, who works in a coffee shop, is asked one too many times if she’s also an artist at chichi parties full of the type of people who would like to be noticed by a frat boy with a portfolio. She doesn’t necessarily lose her mind but instead discovers her inner narcissist. Jealous of the attention a woman gets while being mauled by a dog, Signe tries to get one to bite her; offended by the courtesies not paid to her at one of Thomas’s celebratory dinners, she fakes a deadly nut allergy, allowing her to play martyr even as the caterer has a panic attack. Thomas is a monster. Human slime. As is Signe. They would be perfect for each other if either had a single generous impulse. Her gambits largely fail–or, more to the point, the rewards for indulging a kink escalate from thrill at a glimpse of stocking to hunger for atrocities truly shocking, so she sets herself on a course for possibly fatal self-mutilation.
There are lots of places to go with Sick of Myself, all of which bear some fruit. The obvious attack on people who would use the language of disability and threatened classes for their own elevation is right on the surface, but dig only a little and find salvos fired on enablers who profit from these soulless hucksters and consumers desperate for a morally defensible flag to follow. No motives are pure, and, ultimately, Borgli lands at a place where no pure motives are possible. The world is divided between the openly hateful and the Get Out liberal: self-dealers and righteous masturbators. The journalist friend does a spread on the tragedy of Signe’s disfigurement but declines to publish a follow-up revealing Signe’s ruse because “it’s too insane.” But maybe she doesn’t do a retraction because it isn’t sexy enough and would make her look bad, besides, in a rapidly-shrinking journalistic landscape. Maybe Thomas does feel remorse for dismissing Signe’s early symptoms and can be forgiven in this instance for being a self-obsessed prat, since Signe is not only the girl who cried wolf but the wolf herself. And Signe, initially heckled out of a support group for sufferers of emotional fragility, learns the language of suffering that will allow her to achieve fellowship amongst these human bits and pieces and, with it, belonging. Belonging of what kind? Where does anyone fit in now if the taxonomy of grievance is the main occupation of the “good” guys, who should be spending all that energy making real change instead of getting distracted by valuations of trauma? It’s an angry enough film that Sick of Myself could easily be read as a poet of the devil’s part–but I think that’s the easy way out of the vicious self-examination it invites. How far down the road to being addicted to those attaboys are we, even though we’re watching the world fall apart?
