It’s beyond satire and extremely close to body horror, as the disease mutates and the genre of “Sick of Myself” swells until it explodes, leaving a bloody mess in its midst.īut however sticky “Sick of Myself” gets, there’s rarely much doubt about how funny it is. But then what? The lies pile up, and her seesawing existence between self-pity and a search for something always more painful becomes increasingly corrosive. Finally, everyone around Signe begins to notice her plight (and Kujath Thorp maintains an awe-inspiring level of deluded stubbornness throughout) and, for a minute, she’s won. Many, many pills later, the rash begins to spread. Because does pain or pleasure really exist if you can’t see it? Signe decides the only way to be noticed will be to take the very necessary and very illegal drugs that will give her an extremely rare and serious skin disease. Borgli takes the film in a darker direction than the vignettes where these big kids just keep embarrassing themselves (she pretends to have a severe nut allergy, while he steals, uh, chairs). Thomas’ career as an avant-garde kleptomaniac artist skyrockets, and Signe is coughing up dust. ‘In Flames’ Review: This Pakistani Horror Film Shows How the Strings Attached to Gifts Can Strangle Youīut there’s a shift. It might be how they fell in love but it’ll also be how they grow to despise one another, their shared vices quickly turning into a competition: When two people are dying for attention in this way, the only possible outcome is total annihilation. We begin with a shared focus on Signe and her artist boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther), two equally grating people obsessed with doing bad things (sometimes to make other people feel bad, but also just to feel literally anything themselves) because they don’t know how to do anything else. When Renate Reinsve’s wandering heroine Julie from “The Worst Person in the World” worried about just how detestable she might become, she was probably thinking about someone like Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) in “ Sick of Myself.” Another Oslo Pictures feature, though more acerbic and uncomfortable than Joachim Trier’s beloved romantic comedy, Kristoffer Borgli’s scathing portrait of nihilistic narcissism taps into similar deadpan humor but walks a much more precarious tightrope between uncomfortable satire and plain cruelty. Utopia releases the film in theaters on Wednesday, April 12. This article was originally published with the title "Natural Immunity: What Happens When We Simply See a Sick Person" in SA Mind 21, 4, 8 (September 2010)ĭoi:10.Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. “If I see a bunch of sick people, maybe a big infection is around, and I better kick my immune system into high gear.” It is unclear exactly how an image gets translated into a mustering of immune cells, Schaller says, but many neurochemicals connect the brain to the immune system-more studies are needed to tease out the exact chain of events. “It makes evolutionary sense that the immune system would respond aggressively only when it’s really needed,” says Mark Schaller, a psychologist and co-author of the study. Whereas the gun images prompted a mere 7 percent increase in IL-6, levels of the substance were elevated 24 percent after viewing pictures of sick people. Although the subjects rated the gun photographs as being more stressful than the illness images, the blood work told a different story. Immediately after the subjects viewed the slide shows, researchers drew their blood, exposed each sample to bacteria and then measured the levels of a substance known as interleukin-6 (IL-6), which is secreted by white blood cells as a response to stress or trauma. Researchers at the University of British Columbia showed subjects one of two different slide shows-either a depiction of people brandishing guns or images of individuals who were obviously ailing. Now a study shows that seeing sick people can even prompt changes in the immune system. When we see others who seem under the weather, we experience a powerful emotional response-disgust-and do our best to avoid those who might be contagious. Humans have a natural aversion to those who are ill.
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