Review: Edgy satire ‘Sick of Myself’ takes narcissism to a hilariously queasy new level

American citizens don’t really have to imagine what it’s like to live with a malignant narcissist. And yet the razor’s-edge satire “Sick of Myself” from Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli posits a version of it for an insecure young Oslo woman that’s so outlandishly perverse, yet steeped in recognizable modern neuroses, that it might just have you tracking your own self-pity for danger signals between fits of horrified, sputtering laughter.

Think David Cronenberg taking a crack at the competitive, self-centered romantic unease at the core of “The Worst Person in the World,” and you’ll have some notion of what’s in store for coffeeshop worker Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) as she tallies the attention-grabbing brashness of her rising-star artist boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther), and longs for her own shot at mollifying adoration.

At a swanky restaurant for Signe’s birthday, Thomas hogs the occasion by urging her into creating a diversion so he can run off with a $2,300 bottle of wine. The bad-boy cachet it gives him in their social group is also what spurs him to steal high-end furniture and repurpose it for his art. He then gets noticed by a gallery and sparks a magazine profile. That Signe feels ignored and jealous by all this is relatable, but her attempts to draw focus start at sad, move to questionable, then rapidly swerve toward grossly manipulative and self-destructive.

It starts, ironically, with samaritanism, when she leaps to tend to a coffeeshop customer savagely bitten by a dog. Drinking up the gratitude of medics and believing she was the woman’s only savior, Signe walks home almost proudly wearing the victim’s blood on her clothes and in her hair. When the light of her self-congratulatory heroism fades, however, her reflexive move is to try to coax a stranger’s dog into attacking her own neck.

But it’s the sympathy she gets after faking a nut allergy at a fancy art world dinner for Thomas that warps her into thinking victimhood is the way to go. (It helps when you don’t notice the caterer practically melting down.) Inspired by reading about the disfiguring side effects of a dubious Russian anxiety pill, Signe embarks on a Munchausen-syndrome campaign of spotlight martyrdom that in some ways gives her exactly what she wants, but also more than she bargained for as a portal into the realm of suffering.

Her gimmick is nuts, and in his three-card-monte-style editing, Borgli plays with our and Signe’s belief in the effectiveness of it, too, faking us out with twists revealed to be either dreams or nightmares. (The score, too, credited to Turns, humorously toggles between sentimental and Bernard Herrmann-esque as if trying to keep up with her mindset.)

There’s no getting around how disturbing Signe is as a person of supremely bad judgment in her quest to be interesting. But as a black mirror into how egomaniacal madness blends readily into an empathy-sensitive (as opposed to empathetic) society, she’s a distinctively of-the-moment comic creation, thrillingly played in all her cringeworthy need and performative injuriousness by Thorp. Borgli is also shrewd enough a satirist to keep reminding us that alongside her, Thomas is no less of a moral vacuum — Sæther’s blithe selfishness is uniquely funny as the worst possible test case for Signe in her insane bid to be the female Joseph Merrick.

When she connects with a modeling agency whose focus is progressive-chic inclusivity, the laughs get a tad queasier, but the movie’s thematic out is always the tense limits of Signe’s bizarre experimentation with trauma and our social contract with it. As the satire retains its acridness to the very end, “Sick of Myself” proves itself well-aware that narcissists don’t learn lessons — they learn how to adapt. After all, Signe tearily admits at one point, with what is probably one of the funniest lines about our current era of shamelessness, “No one wants to be a psychopath.”