You Should Stream ‘Sick of Myself’ This Weekend, If You Dare

This weekend a movie arrives in theaters that seems almost custom-built to be the object of online fascination. It comes from A24 (trendiest movie studio) and stars Nicolas Cage (most memeable movie actor) as a college professor who suddenly starts showing up in people's dreams.

The movie, from Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli and produced by Beau Is Afraid's Ari Aster, has a lot going for it. Cage gives one of his most committed, hilarious performances, and Borgli finds absurd angles in his premise. For instance, when Cage's Paul Matthews starts appearing in people's subconscious imaginings, he's not doing anything, just smiling a weird smile. When Paul finds out he's as ineffectual in dreams as he is in life, annoys him to no end.

Dream Scenario ultimately has a lot to say about modern virality. Without spoiling too much, Paul eventually milkshake ducks—albeit in the context of people's dreams—and the film tries to make a point about cancel culture and its whims. Some of it works; some of it may have you scratching your head trying to determine what exactly Borgli is trying to say.

With its big star and flashy marketing, Dream Scenario marks Borgli’s arrival on the indie scene as a talent to watch. But it's also not his first feature, or even the first Borgli movie released in the U.S. in 2023. And if you really want a taste of his fucked-up mind, I'd recommend his other 2023 movie, Sick of Myself, streaming now on Paramount+. Like Dream Scenario, Sick of Myself takes a character’s very 21st-century thirst for recognition to its illogical, absurdist end. It also happens to get extremely, tantalizingly gross.

Set in Oslo, Sick of Myself centers on Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp), a millennial who is desperate for attention. She gets some in one of the film’s opening scenes, after coming to the aid of a woman who gets attacked by a dog at the coffee shop where Signe works. But soon the thrill of walking home covered in blood and telling the story wears off, and she starts to resent her furniture artist boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther), also a dick, for hogging the spotlight. In one great scene she tries to draw eyes on her by faking an allergy during a dinner party. When she forgets about her ruse and eats off another plate, she has to pretend to collapse.

Signe has an empty hole inside of her, and goes to extremes trying to fill it. She finds a Russian drug that causes facial deformities on the internet, then procures it, and starts taking it. The effects start manifesting in horrifying ways.

Borgli goes wild with prosthetics as Signe's face swells and pusses and scabs. And yet this is not exactly an immediate cautionary tale. It is, of course, disgusting, but, even though her visage is gnarled, Signe does, at least a little bit, get everything she wants. She's featured in a newspaper article, and gets a modeling gig for a brand that wants to be quote-unquote inclusive. Still, it's a prison of her own making, and even her ailments aren't enough to stop her friends from getting annoyed at her.

Sick of Myself is a monster movie two times over. There's the literal element of body horror as Signe's face bleeds and puffs, but there's also the figurative monster that is the desire to have all eyes on you at every moment. It's not that Sick of Myself says really anything new about fame hunters—it's just that it does so in a way that makes you want to clutch your face and avert your eyes.

Borgli never gets hung up on shots of Signe scrolling Instagram the way so many other parables of this kind of obsession do. Instead, he watches her turn into something truly grotesque. It's impossible to look away.

Originally Appeared on GQ