Sick of Myself (2022)
Directed by Kristoffer Borgli
How honest do we want to be with ourselves here?
Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Myself is a remarkable examination of the petty behavior exhibited by the petulant (something I know all too well!) It’s a tremendous exercise in attention-seeking, where currency is procured through likes and followers, where a culture weaned on Instagram hucksters peddling clinical diagnoses has everyone believing they have ADHD or are victims of narcissistic personality disorder. It’s a film about the cult of victimhood, whereby the dull and vapid embrace an identity of The Sufferer to garner pity and prominence. Where everyone must be the main character of their ““journey””, we observe the horrifyingly desperate lengths in which a person must validate their existence. Sick of Myself is the horror film event of 2023.
Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) is the Tweedledee to Thomas’ (Eirik Sæther) Tweedledum. They’re first observed in a posh Norwegian restaurant, where Thomas requests a bottle of wine. The waiter makes it clear that it’s an expensive bottle. They subsequently dine and dash, bottle in tow, only to share it at a party with Thomas’ artist friends. It’s not so much the wine that’s important in this circumstance, it’s the experience. To say it’s been stolen. To be able to tell the story. Signe desperately wants the narrative to center around her, but Thomas, as the orchestrator of the crime, basks in its perceived edginess and glory.
Signe works at a cafe and has a moment of quote unquote clarity when a customer runs in covered in blood after a violent dog attack. Signe stays with the injured woman, as blood from a puncture wound to the neck prominently coats Signe’s smock. But in that moment of crisis she observes the attention she’s garnering. Signe’s a hero. She returns home and makes the deliberate choice to remain in her blood-tattered outfit, garnering the sympathy of Thomas as the story of her act of heroism ends up informing her curated identity.
But it’s not enough. At a dinner party, she fakes a peanut allergy to garner more attention. The attention provides her with a dopamine rush. It’s never quite enough. And so she decides to take a prescription drug called Lidexol (this is a bit of clever advertising). Its side effects include a wicked skin rash and disfigurement. She overdoses but refuses to be seen by a doctor until it’s too late. She doesn’t disclose what she’s been doing, leaving clinicians stumped and unsure as to what to do. But it’s this disfigurement that she weaponizes, permitting her to garner sympathy and a modicum of fame (she gloats about being retweeted by a Norwegian celebrity). But, as it were, it’s not quite enough.
Sick of Myself is exactly the film I needed to see at this time in my life. It takes some of the sociopolitical ideas presented in fellow Nordic filmmaker Ruben Östlund’s filmography (particularly the recent Triangle of Sadness) and funnels them through a bitter, uncompromising vision of indulgence. It fits snuggly in the recent run of films I’ve watched that have observed the systematic disruption of gore capitalism, resulting in a society of sycophants and faux-victims. And still fresh in my brain are the new episodes of Bill Hader’s Barry, which argues that people embracing their most viscous and detestable qualities still believe that they could be “Good.” It’s a quality that Sick of Myself wears like a badge of honor, where fantasies of redemption always exclude accountability or consequences or whatever phony slogan-of-the-week terminology we want to adopt to punish people. Hurt people hurt people and the helped are more prone to help but we tend to favor the former over the latter, don’t we?