Signe is dating an artist who loves to steal: he pretends to celebrate his beloved's birthday to take a $2300 bottle of wine.

Signe believes that only narcissists succeed, as she works as a waitress.

However, she is tired of going unnoticed, of speaking while others don't listen, and of never being "in focus."

After she, amid others' indifference, helps a woman mortally wounded by a dog and returns home covered in blood, something in her changes.

Through online research, she finds a drug, Lidexol, a powerful sedative that causes visible effects on the skin. She goes to her friend Stian, a disturbed dealer with his mother in tow, and asks him to get her the drug produced in Russia.

Thus begins her journey of addiction and intoxication that torments the skin of her body and face, making it monstrous.

Her mythomania had already manifested through an uncontrollable compulsion to lie to make herself more interesting in the eyes of others.

Reality and fantasy continually blur, partly due to the sedative, making her sometimes reveal everything she can't say, i.e., the truth and what she thinks others think of her, often leading her into situations of great embarrassment.

Between Thomas, her partner, and herself, there is a constant competition that feeds their viral need to appear and to be seen.

Signe's pleasure ignites when he uses caring words towards her or when she imagines making a list for her funeral where her father and a friend who never visited her in the hospital are not welcome; a funeral that requires a stamp to attend, like a high-society event.

During a self-help group, she is told she is lucky because she has a visible illness, while others suffer from different disorders invisible to inattentive eyes.

She starts entering the advertising market through an inclusive agency, with a blind secretary, where she works as a model: the shooting in a museum, where she wears the "regardless" brand surrounded by gigantic statues, directors, and fashion assistants, will be quite cynical and embarrassing.

Her boyfriend, faced with her visibility, does not hesitate to ask her to be the muse for his future exhibition.

Among human opacity, systemic horrors, the quest for visibility, and contemporary pseudopathologies, some sequences recall the moments of embarrassment depicted in Ruben Ostlund's films, while some themes point to the obsessive pursuit of attention, compassion, and care of Babis Makridis' unforgettable Miserere.

But Kristoffer Borgli's version lives on a surprising, paradoxical, absurd, yet undeniable, current, and concrete vision of our factual reality.

The big question posed by this film is how much one is a victim or an architect of one's own disorder; after all, pathologies are constantly evolving, and psychiatric disorders are a sign of the times: the change in social, cultural, and economic factors contributes to the change in psychiatric disorders.

The problem of contemporary Dasein is no longer Heideggerianly the being of the privileged entity questioning itself about being but has become something merely thrown into the world and subject to its limitations, obligations, obsessions, servitudes, virality, appearances: an entity no longer capable of transcending itself with an act of freedom, without the possibility of planning possible attitudes and actions.

An entity that suffers and acts while suffering, conditioned by the viral claustrophobia of appearing to feel existent and present.

The horror infection of the obsessive-compulsive visibility virus will not be easily eradicated with a vaccine: challenges, the search for likes, followers, and views are its inescapable viral demonstration.

Signe's skin represents the psychosomatic illness of this decade: sores, scars, inflammations, deformities, monstrosities caused by a sedative drug ingested like candies, just to feel alive, seen, represented, recognized, existing, living, albeit absent and unconscious.

A self-destructive process, without any recourse to the instinct of self-preservation, that impulse directed at the protection of oneself and one's integrity now on the brink of extinction.

The evolution of the human species is turning towards the strongest impulse, that internal tyrant to which not only reason but also our conscience is subjected, as Nietzsche would say.

A complex and direct film, cynical and mocking, dramatically provocative and caustic: a cruel artistic gaze, of flesh and blood, where the body suffers from what the paranoia of the system and technology are doing to us.

05-Oct-2023 by Beatrice