Folktales review – taking on tyranny of social media as teens learn to live like hunter-gatherers

In this documentary, high schoolers camp out in subzero temperatures, making their own fires and driving sledges in the wild The Pasvik Folk high school in remote northern Norway teaches teenagers to grow as young adults and escape the pressures of toxic social media by challenging them to get back in touch with their “stone age brain” and live like hunter-gatherers in the snowy wild. This is the subject of a documentary from Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. Over winter months of almost continuous darkness, the teens cleanse themselves with tasks such as camping out in subzero weather, making their own fires and driving sledges with huskies. Prior to all this of course is presumably a solemn promise to do without their phones, tablets and laptops, although there are no scenes of the kids actually having to surrender these gadgets (this isn’t rehab, after all). They have to swim in icy water; and they make it look like fun. What doesn’t look like fun is the camping out and there is one t...

Sick of Myself review – like-chasing narcissist is focus of online fame horror-satire

A strong lead performance can’t save this unsubtle Norwegian film about a woman who goes too far in chasing social media clout

Kristoffer Borgli’s body-horror satire has had some enthusiastic reviews since it premiered at Cannes last year; I found the Norwegian film unsubtle and unrewarding, exhaustingly implausible on a basic realist level, and containing a jarring obviousness which makes its supposed commentary on society and celebrity all but valueless.

It does, however, have a strong lead performance from Kristine Kujath Thorp, who plays Signe, a young woman in Oslo who is in an uneasy relationship with Thomas (Eirik Sæther), an insufferably conceited conceptual artist creating sculptures from stolen office furniture. In her peevish and snippy way, Signe is toxically jealous of Thomas’s status and prestige; she resents her own subordinate position in their friend group as his girlfriend and her humiliatingly lowly job as a coffee shop barista. There is a weird echo here of Joachim Trier’s incomparably superior The Worst Person in the World, and Sick of Myself features a droll cameo from Trier’s key player, Anders Danielsen Lie.

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