Sick of Myself

Kristoffer Borgli came up through music videos and the Oslo art scene before his first feature, DRIB, a slippery satire of advertising and authenticity. Sick of Myself, his second, premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2022 and announced him as one of the sharpest comic voices in Nordic cinema — a filmmaker equally interested in body horror and in the small humiliations of dinner parties. He followed it with Dream Scenario, his first American film, for A24.

Kristine Kujath Thorp, who broke through in Ninjababy, plays Signe, a barista whose boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther) has become a minor celebrity for sculptures made from stolen furniture. Tired of standing at the edge of his photographs, she sets about engineering a crisis of her own, and the film tracks her appetite for sympathy with mounting, squirm-inducing precision. Borgli shoots in the cool, clean palette of Scandinavian design, which makes the prosthetic effects all the more startling, and he lets scenes of social comedy run just long enough to curdle. Thorp's performance, vain and wounded and oddly magnetic, carries the film's balance between laughter and revulsion.

Critics compared it to Östlund and Cronenberg in the same breath; it won the Amanda for Best Screenplay and was named best Norwegian film by the country's critics. More than a satire of influencer culture, it is a precise study of how attention is traded and hoarded — and one of the defining European comedies of the social-media age.