Kristine Kujath Thorp’s Signe is one-half of a criminally, hilariously awful couple. When her self-regarding boyfriend, Thomas (Eirik Sæther), finds a baffling degree of success with his installations of stolen chairs, Signe becomes locked in attention-seeking escalations that make one think of Roald Dahl’s The Twits upgraded for TikTokers. A dinner party at which she claims to have a deadly nut allergy – she doesn’t – recalls Claes Bang’s squirm-inducing condom scene in The Square and other social horrors within the Reuben Östlund oeuvre.
When Signe suggests that others have told her she should start a podcast, Thomas’s belittling response is, “Who says that?”
The rising cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, who also worked on Mandy and After Yang, playfully uses close-ups to maximise the discomfort.
Signe’s immediate instincts to help a woman bitten by a dog are commendable; her secondary instincts to transform her own actions into an increasingly heroic tale of derring-do are less admirable. A grandstanding act of spotlight-hogging finally eclipses her constant small lies. When she reads an online article about a Russian drug called Lidexol that causes mysterious skin mutations, she hastens to her drug dealer, Stian (Steinar Klouman Hallert), to buy huge quantities of it. Her early symptoms are easily dismissed by the preening Thomas, but after copious dosing Signe succumbs to alarming symptoms. Cue bedside visitors, full facial bandaging and the arrival of an inclusive modelling agent (Andrea Bræin Hovig).
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Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s pitch-black comedy makes merry with malignant narcissism and the worried well. Signe’s behaviour may be repugnant, but there is something touchingly pathetic about her need for sympathy from Thomas. “Ask me again how I’m doing,” she says during foreplay. He later lists off the guests who will be at her funeral, to climactic effect.
Thorp was recently (and rightly) named best actress at Dublin International Film Festival for her unflinching performance. In her darker thoughts, Signe is diagnosed by a doctor (played by The Worst Person in the World’s Anders Danielsen Lie) as “not the coolest person at parties”. Even this damning report fails to give pause.
