Few stories start at the third act, but that’s the initial sensation of Sick of Myself: that Signe (Thorp) has already reached the point of her life when all she needs is an instigating incident to make a change. How it does so – bloodily, shockingly – is less important than her reaction, which is not one of redemption. Instead, it’s a full-force trip into an aggressive, life-disrupting form of narcissism that expresses itself in a literally self-destructive fashion.
In Kristoffer Borgli’s jet-black satire, Signe is furious that her wastrel artist boyfriend, Thomas (Sæther), is finally achieving a modicum of success, and her increasing frustration that she’s being left in the background leads her to indulge in self-mutilation through a suspect Russian drug with horrible side effects. Laughably pretentious as Thomas’ furniture-based installations are, they’re nowhere near as intrusive as her desperate attempt to be the center of conversation due to the scars, rashes, and buboes that appear on her flesh.
This is Munchausen’s syndrome as performance art, as Signe uses her self-inflicted affliction to manipulate an emotional response from those around her, just as Borgli elicits an undeniable sense of schadenfreude from her inevitable fall from a deliberate diet of self-poisoning. Sick of Myself constantly alienates the viewer from Signe, filming her from a voyeuristic distance, making them almost an interloper, watching her from cafe tables or across a crowded fashion shoot. It is only in Walter Mittyesque fantasy sequences that they are given a real insight into her solipsism, and those are far more disturbing than the sequences during which she endures horrific consequences in her search for attention.
Working from his own script, Borgli inverts Todd Haynes’ psychological eco-drama, 1995’s Safe. In that, Haynes subjected Julianne Moore’s L.A. housewife to toxic shock from trying to exist in our poisoned times: Here Signe picks her own poison, disinterested in the state of her own body as anything other than a tool for her quest to be the topic of conversation. There’s something intriguingly petty at play in Signe’s fantasies: not to be loved, or adored, or even pitied, but instead to push others aside. Borgli manages to make a commentary on our vilest social media alter egos without ever mentioning social media – indeed, Signe’s ultimate aim is to get in TV and print, but even then it’s just a lane to lord it over everyone in her life through emotional manipulation.
If it wasn’t for Thorp, this would be intolerable, but as Signe she creates a fascinatingly off-putting character study of a menace to society. There’s no redemptive third act here, yet she still creates a rounded depiction of a singularly minded bully.
This article appears in April 28 • 2023.
