“No one has free will. No one wants to be a psychopath. No one wants to have destructive urges.”

In her brilliant 2022 short story collection titled ‘Bad Thoughts’, writer Nada Alic explores contemporary women’s irreverent and surreal internal thoughts and fantasies. Alic’s stories, which indicate and express the often feral proclivities and inner monologues experienced by many individuals, are written with acute agitation and each story makes perfect and hilarious sense. ‘There are things in your life that you’re like, “I want to hear that other people have thought this terrible thing, so I feel less bad,” Alic told Sophia June in an interview with NYLON magazine.

Saying ‘the bad thoughts out loud’ is conventionally unexpected and, as the success of Alic’s book demonstrates, relatable. Part of the reason television shows like Seinfeld endure is because the characters have no compunctions about niceness, doing what is right, or saying the right thing. Alic’s book resonated with so many because we all have these so-called ‘bad thoughts’ that usually remain hidden as unhinged internal monologues, like dirty little personal secrets. Whether we translate these thoughts into actions in a bid for attention and infamy is another matter entirely. 

This is the pitch-black heart of Norwegian writer/director Kristoffer Borgli’s hilarious Sick of Myself, a wickedly dark riff on society’s obsession with celebrity, Munchausen’s, cancel culture, and the extreme narcissism of the social media age. In an interview with Wendy Ide for Screen Daily, Borgli said he was writing the film “more based on my own taste, and that I like these ‘unlikeable’ characters. Characters that break all moral norms and break all the boundaries that you’re not allowed to in real life. It’s a thrill to watch that type of character in cinema, or fiction in general. It’s a way to exorcise some demons.” His film is the flip side of 2021’s The Worst Person in the World, the award-winning third and final part of Joaquim Trier’s Oslo Trilogy, where the film’s protagonist Julie (‎Renate Reinsve) worried about being perceived as a terrible person. In Sick of Myself, Signe is the embodiment of Julie’s fear.

Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) is a compulsive liar and self-absorbed young woman who thrives on attention. Every conversation must be about her or something that has happened to her. Anecdotes may be rooted in the mundane but always heightened for extremity, excitement, and emphasis, such as telling people she has six toes or feigning a fatal nut allergy at a dinner party. While some films or directors would allow their audience to discover this character defect over the course of the film, Borgli presents Signe’s performative narcissism from the very first scene.

The film opens with Signe and her kleptomaniac boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther) in a restaurant. As self-absorbed as she, with an equally inflated sense of self-worth, Thomas — a conceptual artist whose gallery installations consist of chairs he has stolen from furniture stores — orders an expensive bottle of wine, which he plans to steal by legging it out of the restaurant. Signe agrees to the plan, but only if they tell their friends she’s the thief. Their wine heist is further interrupted when a Birthday cake arrives for Signe, and Thomas complains she has drawn unnecessary attention to herself. However, all attention is desirable to her, including the eyes of the waiter who ignores her smoking on the street as he chases Thomas in pursuit of payment. Oblivious to her presence, she is incredulous and astounded at her invisibility.

Signe and Thomas’ entire relationship is a never-ending quest for centre stage as they relay their anecdotes to friends and whomever will listen with an inflated sense of grandeur and self-worth. It’s an inherently toxic dynamic, and they would be nightmares to be around, yet they are ideally suited. They are made for each other, but you can’t help but think they will eventually destroy one another and themselves in the process.

When Thomas’ art career takes off, Signe is desperate to regain the spotlight and place some attention back on herself. Scrolling Twitter, she sees an article on the Daily Mail’s news feed about Lidexol, a Russian drug banned due to causing a severe and extremely rare skin disease. Rather than shock or sympathy, she sees an opportunity. Ordering bulk quantities of Lidexol through her dealer Stian (Steinar Klouman Hallert), Signe takes vast amounts of Lidexol to make herself sick and garner attention. After days of taking the drug with no side effects besides drowsiness and occasional narcolepsy, a rash materialises on Signe’s arm and neck, and a moment of joy flashes on her face. That night in bed, she positions herself in such a way that Thomas is sure to notice but is disappointed when he encourages her to see a doctor. During the examination, she refuses to remove her jacket because a diagnosis and cure are not part of her plan. 

As Signe ingests even more Lidexol and becomes increasingly disfigured, the film verges from acerbic rom-com to subversive body horror, and her disfigurement becomes so extreme she is hospitalised and issued a mask reminiscent of the one worn by Édith Scob in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1960). Yet she relishes her inconvenience, basks in her wrongness, taking selfies and posing like an Instagram influencer in front of the hospital’s mirrors. The incredible image of Signe sitting in a wheelchair with her bandaged face and gown, smoking a cigarette and wearing sunglasses while scrolling her phone in the sunshine is idiosyncratic, enduring, and extremely funny. 

These visuals are part of the film’s joy, each so sharp and often rapid. Thorp’s performance has a subtle physicality, whether rolling tablets into her mouth, falling asleep pouring coffee, or spontaneously throwing her laptop out the window to stop Thomas from glancing at what he believes to be porn on her screen. The film frequently veers into fantasy, one highlight being a brilliant scene when a doctor (played by real-life M.D. and star of The Worst Person in the World Anders Danielson Lie in a cameo that further heightens the connection between both films) arrives to tell Signe the results of her CT scan: that she has abused illegal drugs, lies a lot, is not the coolest person at parties, and that she has a bad and sometimes racist sense of humour (“I haven’t seen that for quite some time.”) Calmy, he reveals that so much is wrong with her personality that the police have been called and are waiting outside, ready to execute her. 

Going home from the hospital, Signe is annoyed to find only 56 messages on her phone. She immediately complains about the lack of visitors, saying the friends who didn’t take the time to visit are not welcome at her funeral. The ‘funeral guest list’ becomes the set-up to an incredible sex scene where the eroticism revolves around every individual’s final public appearance, albeit one they will never see for themselves. Pondering who will attend your funeral is a narcissist’s fantasy, and Signe takes it to the extreme. “Ask me again how I’m doing,” she urges Thomas, becoming increasingly turned-on, before breathily asking him to describe her funeral in minute detail. As he regales her with the specifics of his grief, the ‘guest list,’ and the line out of the church, arousal increases, and she climaxes on hearing how her father was refused from the service because he was not on the guest list. The French term for orgasm is ‘la petite mort’ or ‘the little death’ because the sensation is likened to death, and each one brings us closer to the inevitable. For Signe, it is death — significantly, her death — that brings her to orgasm.

In sickness, Signe has the attention she seeks. However, it is not enough. As Thomas’ success increases, her compulsive tendencies go into overdrive, and she takes further action. When Thomas gives a magazine interview about his art, she pushes to be interviewed about her illness and is appeased, albeit briefly, when her story is published. Yet nothing is permanent in news, fame can be fleeting, and her health ordeal is soon redundant when breaking news of a gunman shooting his family dominates the website’s homepage. Deluded by thinking she is more important than this tragedy, Signe calls her journalist friend Marte (Fanny Vaager) asking if her interview can be bumped back to the top of the page. Incredulous it can’t, she shouts, “what fucking nerd shoots his whole family?” in exasperation.

Thorp is superb as Signe, a woman so self-involved she has intense issues with genuine tragedy or trauma but cannot see why her faking it is so problematic and wrong. Her actions are often questionable, despicable, and inappropriate, and she is indeed a terrible person, but utterly compelling to watch, largely because of Thorp’s performance. Occasionally she allows rare flashes of sadness to cross Signe’s face, and there are moments towards the end of the film when we may find ourselves feeling modicums of sympathy as she displays hints of being sick of herself.

In this story of self-sabotage and social wrongs are some very astute comments about public perception and the nature of performance. The film riffs on this well, especially the divide between how we present ourselves in public and who we are personally, such as the agent who signs Signe to her “inclusive” modelling agency, virtual signalling in the name of public image, but not wanting to be held legally responsible for any of her client’s health troubles.

Early in the film, a woman stumbles into the café where Signe works after being severely bitten in a dog attack. Two weeks later, she is still talking about the ordeal, not out of sympathy for the woman bleeding, but to boast how she helped and the trauma she (not the victim) experienced. After the incident, Signe walked home in a blood-soaked shirt, and the other woman’s blood unwiped from her face so that passersby stare and ask if she’s ok. But at the end of the film, Signe is the one in need of help. Her condition has worsened to the extreme, and she is the helpless one in desperate need of attention not out of vanity, but of need. Yet the room is more concerned by those fainting in reaction to her deterioration, or the ones screaming that they can’t be held accountable for the situation. Once the storyteller, Signe has now become the story of someone else’s attention-seeking narrative.

Towards the end of the film, Signe fantasises about writing a best-selling book of her experiences and becoming a celebrity capitalising on her ordeal. It’s not that far-fetched when you think about it. It is also her most self-aware moment in the film. Unlike its protagonist, Sick of Myself is a cognizant film; Signe embodies the trappings of modern culture in a way that some may consider distasteful, yet merely reflects the society we live. Through her, Borgli presents what many entertain but would never (especially publicly) say or do. Watching nihilistic behaviour by terrible people or putting socially relatable bad thoughts into play may be deemed wrong, naughty, or repellent, but when done right it’s hilarious, thrilling, and wickedly good.

*This essay was written for the booklet of Vinegar Syndrome/OCN’s 2023 release of ‘Sick of Myself’, available to buy here: https://vinegarsyndrome.com/products/sick-of-myself