Sick of Myself

Summary: 8/10: a hilarious, unnervingly well-constructed portrait of a serious disorder, carried by a fearless performance from Kristine Kujath Thorp, that fools its characters and its audience by the same method.

The direction is the film's real feat, considering the material. Kristoffer Borgli's black comedy starts its two leads close to caricature, a narcissist and a bigger narcissist, locked in a competition neither will admit they're having. Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) is losing her boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther) to his sudden fame as a sculptor who builds his pieces from furniture he's stolen. Rather than compete on any axis where she might actually win, she chooses illness, poisoning herself with a black-market drug to trigger a disfiguring skin reaction, then riding the sympathy it generates like a woman who has finally found her calling.

But director Kristoffer Borgli and Thorp keep pulling you back from the cartoon; every so often the film lets you see the panic underneath Signe's performance, the real emotional hunger driving the con, and suddenly she stops being a type and becomes a person you recognize, possibly from your own worst behavior at a dinner party. That's a difficult juggling act to hold for ninety minutes, but this film holds it, in spite of some slowness toward the end of act two.

Thorp's performance is the engine, and it's a genuinely brilliant one. She has to play a woman lying to everyone around her while also, in a sense, lying to the audience, and she does it by never breaking the fiction from the inside; Signe believes her own performance so completely that we start to as well.

The film's cleverest trick is structural. Signe's elaborate fantasies, the magazine profiles, the modeling contracts, the tearful public vindications she imagines for herself, are staged with the same visual conviction as the film's reality, so that you, like Signe's friends, absorb them as plausible before you catch yourself and realiz...