Sick of Myself film review — satire turns mania for attention into disfiguring drug

Norwegian feature Sick of Myself is, as the title might suggest, a film in queasily bad taste: it comes as no surprise that it has had the thumbs-up from cinema’s “Pope of Trash”, John Waters. The film is breathtakingly mean-spirited — but in a way that you often wish social satires would have the nerve to be. And Kristoffer Borgli’s horror comedy of manners certainly has no shortage of nerve.

Kristine Kujath Thorp plays Signe, a young café worker with no apparent talent, and seemingly little redeeming character, but who is desperate for attention. She is in a competitive look-at-me relationship with Thomas (Eirik Saether), a smugly clueless conceptual artist (mixed media: rampant ego, stolen furniture). When Thomas gets a solo show, Signe wants in on the attention, and steals the show by feigning a nut allergy — which launches her on a career of spectacularly self-destructive acting-out. After reading a report (on Mail Online, where else) about a Russian drug with a side effect of causing people’s faces to erupt horribly, she begins a concerted campaign of overdosing.

As Signe achieves the desired result — and more — the jokes turn increasingly cruel: with her face resembling a treasure map etched in blood and loose flesh, Signe is signed up by a model agency specialising in disability chic (there’s an overworked running gag about the boss’s blind assistant). Eventually, the film hovers on the verge of an Ab Fab episode guest-directed by David Cronenberg, but it’s all done with steely cool and a cleverly dislocated structure that integrates glimpses of Signe’s deluded imaginings.

The depiction of pathological narcissistic fabulation rings relevant in the age of Instagram and trumped-up misery memoirs, although some may consider Sick of Myself objectionably flippant or callous about such real-world malaises as Munchausen syndrome or histrionic personality disorder. But that’s the point: Borgli is suggesting that in the age of the 24-hour online persona, western society in general has assumed the characteristics of what were once marginal pathological states.

If the film succeeds in being so caustic and teeth-grindingly comic, it’s partly because of Kristine Kujath Thorp’s Signe — at once gauche, arrogant and oddly innocent. She is never remotely likeable, yet the performance makes us empathise even as we cringe. Signe may not be all of us — but she is more of us than is remotely comfortable.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from April 21