‘Sick Of Myself’ Portrays Our Need For External Validation

This article discusses plot details from “Sick of Myself.”

If you’re reading this, it means you’ve probably already consumed your daily dose of unreality and self-important posts on social media that scream: Look at ME! Look at what I’m doing! Aren’t I great? Isn’t this cool?

It’s enough to make you — I don’t know — maybe want to create an alternate script about the world around you, where you are the one getting all the attention.

And, when the situation calls for it, all the sympathy.

That’s the cynical space in which the pitch-dark new comedy “Sick of Myself” sits. Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli bends the rules of satire, body horror and realism to present a rewardingly textured story steeped in our modern malaise.

It centers on Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp), a young barista in Oslo, Norway, who spends a lot of her day blankly perusing her friends’ online accounts and staring at the faces of coffee shop customers.

Afterward, she comes home to the apartment she shares with her boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther), an “artist” who steals furniture to use both in their hollow residence and in his art shows (often presented in ways that look just pretentious enough to appeal to pompous aesthetes).

Signe’s thinly veiled exasperation makes for acerbically hilarious scenes like when the couple meet up with Thomas’ friends at a bougie cafe where they gush over his next showing at a prestigious gallery. Or rather, as Signe reminds the table, it’s not exactly at that gallery, but outside in a space down the street from it — not to be confused with a premier event.

What’s so cunning about “Sick of Myself” is that it reflects how naturally jealousy can manifest, even among those we’re closest with, in a world where people’s self-worth is dangerously tethered to external validation. Borgli himself is no stranger to this state of mind.

“Even I can have this feeling,” the filmmaker admitted to HuffPost. “A friend of mine who I love and actually support — if that person suddenly gets really successful, it’s like a little piece of me dies.”

These kinds of uncomfortable, socially forbidden truths are what Borgli was wrestling with when he came up with the idea for “Sick of Myself.”

“I have this feeling that just is triggered that I don’t want to listen to and I don’t want to act on it,” he said. “But it does feel painful for whatever reason, and I think that pain is what I wanted to make into a…