Sick of Myself
Syk Pike
Meet the new Worst Person in the World: dangerously narcissistic and disastrously insecure, she’s prepared to do whatever it takes to get your attention.
Signe’s relationship with her boyfriend, Thomas, is toxic. Literally. Both desperately needy and competitive, their pass-agg games of attention-seeking one-upmanship perversely make them perfect for each other. Or each other’s worst enemies. When Thomas’s kleptomania gains him a small amount of artistic cred, his newfound notoriety rankles Signe so much that she deliberately devours poisonous pills in a kind of Munchausen syndrome sans proxy, knowing that the results will be impossible to ignore.
As both a pitch-black satire of our image-obsessed society and a disturbingly dark tale of a very unwell woman’s kamikaze desire to be seen, Sick of Myself delivers. Kristoffer Borgli’s second feature packs a visceral punch in its exploration of a particularly insidious kind of fame-hunger: celebrity victimhood. Kristine Kujath Thorp follows her star performance in Ninjababy (MIFF 2021) with an even more spectacular turn as the deplorable, pitiable Signe, ably supported by Eirik Sæther as Thomas, while a cameo from Anders Danielsen Lie is a knowing wink to Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (originally slated for MIFF 2021), from the same production house. Walking a fine line between body-horror, gross-out hilarity, wild flights of fancy and pathos, Sick of Myself is a caustically warped twist on the fake-it-’til-you-make-it mentality.
“Horribly, shamefully, hilariously relatable … A vicious little treat to enjoy.” – Hollywood Reporter