In late 2023, Dream Scenario premiered to considerable buzz. For the first time in his career, Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli was working with an American studio, backed by A24 and with Ari Aster onboard as producer. But despite the new surroundings, Borgli once again delivered a film about the same thing that’s been consuming him for his entire career.

Across three features and a handful of shorts, Borgli has been quietly testing his audience’s patience — or perhaps their tolerance — for watching the same philosophical spiral unfold again and again. His ruminations aren’t always sharp, but they’re funny, sometimes oddly touching, and, as our ancestors might say, “relevant.”

Where It All Began

Kristoffer Borgli was born in Oslo in 1985. He grew up listening to punk, skateboarding through suburban streets, and shooting DIY videos about extreme sports — standard teenage stuff. One of his earliest jobs was working at a video rental store. Being constantly surrounded by movies, combined with his experience behind the camera, eventually led him to music videos.

Some of those early clips aren’t interesting as standalone work, but they offer glimpses of the filmmaker he would become. Take his 2010 video for Donkeyboy, for example — it features a character with a bandaged face, an image that later reappears in Sick of Myself, even making it onto the film’s poster.

Throughout the 2010s, Borgli transitioned from music videos to short films, gradually inching toward a feature-length debut. His 12-minute short Internet Famous (2014) would evolve into Drib (2017), with the same lead actor. The makeup gags in Former Cult Member Hears Music for the First Time directly foreshadow moments in Sick of Myself, while that same short’s absurdist tone feels lifted straight from Dream Scenario. But beyond these aesthetic echoes, Borgli’s work circles around the same handful of themes — each film a remix of the last.

The Need for Recognition

Borgli’s protagonists suffer from a chronic lack of recognition. But they don’t necessarily want to be acknowledged for what they’ve done — they crave admiration for who they are: their sense of humor, their unrecognized brilliance, their refined taste in art. Showing the world what they’re capable of? Optional. In their minds, the only thing standing between them and fame is a lack of attention.

This unearned narcissism is arguably the central idea running through all of Borgli’s feature films.

He keeps dreaming up new environments for this same psychological condition. In Sick of Myself, Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) genuinely struggles to stand out — she works at a coffee shop and lives in the shadow of her egomaniac artist boyfriend. So she fakes an illness to become a victim, hoping pity will lead to love and admiration. In Drib, Amir Asgharnejad (playing himself) fabricates prank videos to rack up views. And in Dream Scenario, Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) has every opportunity to finish a book he’s been "writing" for decades — the same book that once brought fame to his more ambitious peers. But for Paul, the idea of writing a book is practically equivalent to having written one.

Ironically, Paul does achieve fame — not through his intellect, but because strangers across the world suddenly start seeing him in their dreams. Instead of using the attention as a springboard to publish his book, he gives interviews and negotiates publishing deals that never materialize. Cheap fame is enough for him. After all, he knows — or believes — his book is revolutionary (even if it’s about evolution). He’s already enjoying the praise he thinks he deserves.

But narcissism doesn’t shield Borgli’s characters from insecurity. Quite the opposite: they’re constantly haunted by the suspicion that they might not be as brilliant or special as they’d like to believe. In Drib, the main character is unmoored by a single comment: “So what?” You can wax poetic about art, performance, and comedy all day — but if you can’t explain why it matters, that question becomes existential. Paul in Dream Scenario feels something similar when he’s offered a Sprite commercial instead of a publishing deal.

Contagious Narcissism

Despite the central focus on unusual, standout characters, Borgli populates his films with a similar breed of narcissist. Signe in Sick of Myself is the most extreme, but certainly not the only one. Her boyfriend sympathizes with her until he starts creating his own victim narrative. When he first sees Signe covered in blood, he immediately claims, “I was scared.”

In Drib, both the prankster and the marketer are after the same fame — one through corporate work, the other through exploiting the viral nature of the internet. In Dream Scenario, Paul quickly falls prey to young marketers who know how to manufacture success from nothing. Meanwhile, some of Borgli’s characters seem rather average, as if they’re trapped somewhere in the middle. It’s not that they lack ambition or desire, but their goals are grounded and achievable — for some, dinners with renowned scientists are enough, while others bask in the quiet approval of their colleagues.

This leveling of characters leads to a world where no one can truly declare, “You’re a bad person.” Everyone is at least a little bad — or at best, no better than anyone else. The equality between characters creates a vacuum that moral judgments can’t fill, and as a result, there’s no room for condemnation. It’s a universe where people are too busy keeping their own secrets to pass judgment on anyone else.

Reality and Not Quite

Another core theme for Borgli is the gulf between reality and the image. This rift manifests in various ways: dreams, fantasies, and lies. The further reality and image drift apart, the harder it becomes for Borgli’s characters to maintain control over their lives. Time and again, Borgli comes close to veering into psychological breakdown, but he always pulls back, keeping his characters tethered to a semblance of normalcy — just enough so that they remain human.

In his short film The Place We Call Reality (2012) we see the director’s spiritual awakening, aided by a person who never lets go of his vape, even during meditation. The strange angles reminiscent of late-period Terrence Malick create a ton of pathos, culminating in a tearful Borgli. It’s on-the-nose, but Borgli can also do subtlety.

In 2012, Borgli shot Whateverest — a documentary short about musician Todd Terje, who gave up his career to care for his sick father in his village. The film explores the mountain of unrealized ambition and desires. It was a heartfelt piece that impressed critics from major outlets, including The Guardian. Then it turned out that Whateverest was a mockumentary, much like Inspector Noise, in which Terje plays a musician making drugs.

While shooting Dream Scenario, Borgli posted a video on his YouTube channel called Director Gets Interviewed in His Sleep. Another video featured an interview where Borgli gets shot. It’s almost as if the filmmaker cannot stop shooting absurdities when a camera is nearby.

That sense of derealization carried over into his feature films. In Sick of Myself, Signe is near death but fantasizes about writing an autobiography, hoping it will lead to universal love and acceptance. The line between fantasy and reality is impossible to draw, and it isn’t until Signe returns to her everyday life that any distinction becomes clear. Borgli purposefully blurs the boundaries.

But it’s in his debut feature, Drib, where Borgli reaches the peak of this dissonance. It’s a film that’s equal parts documentary and fiction, about a fake advertising campaign built on fabricated pranks. Borgli thrives in the layers of irony and deception. He’s perfectly comfortable playing in a world where the audience can’t quite tell when they’re being lied to — and sometimes, the lies are so convincing, you’ll question whether they were ever lies at all.

Compared to his earlier works, Dream Scenario seems like a lighter take on Borgli’s ongoing exploration of the real and the unreal. This time, he splits the waking world from dreams — perhaps at the behest of the studio. But the theme of the false self remains ever-present.

Media Play Along

At the intersection of narcissism and virtuality, Borgli turns his gaze toward the media. The media serve as a funhouse mirror, not because they distort reality, but because they reflect too much. In the endless flow of information, it’s easy to piece together any narrative you like. And those who wish to be noticed simply add more noise to the stream, making it wilder and more absurd. Borgli looks at the situation from both sides: in Drib, the characters exploit the lies of the media, while in Eer, the protagonist gets lost in a sea of fake news. Interestingly, Borgli nearly ignores social media altogether, perhaps because traditional media outlets still lend credibility to their headlines.

But Borgli can’t be called a critic of the media. While Black Mirror might doomfully proclaim “Look at what we’ve become,” Borgli laughs at the absurdity of it all. If critics buy into his mockumentary-style films, why not spin a tale about a fake advertising campaign?

Reality seems to play right along with Borgli’s narrative. In 2023, the German magazine Die Aktuelle published an interview with Michael Schumacher, who had been unable to give interviews for ten years due to a head injury. But instead of the former F1 driver, the interview was conducted with an AI model from Charatcter.ai. Of course, Die Aktuelle was slammed by other media outlets, who eagerly reprinted the rumors about the star’s health. In comparison, Borgli’s satirical takes seem almost tame.

Absurdity and Sorrow

A defining characteristic of Borgli’s comedy is the mix of absurdity with an undercurrent of sadness. Every character is tragic in their own way, even when doing something outright silly. Sometimes, Borgli’s humor feels like a confession from someone just emerging from a depressive episode, joking about the very thing that haunts them. But then a new scene arrives that suggests the depressive episode never really ended, and the humor only sharpens.

The most poignant scene in Sick of Myself is also the most absurd: Signe is such a failure that she loses her spot on the front page of Norwegian news, all because of a terrorist attack (which, in Borgli’s world, is somehow funny).

Through laughter and tears, Borgli’s characters approach the point of self-acceptance — real self-acceptance, not the kind they fantasize about. But complete acceptance, from their perspective, means giving up all their ambitions — and they’re not ready to do that just yet.

Despite his singular voice and unique approach, Borgli gleefully draws from the comedy structure of the 2000s. Dream Scenario has more in common with Bruce Almighty or Good Luck Chuck than you might think. Sick of Myself follows a similar framework. But where conventional comedy resolves conflict, Borgli veers off toward unanswered questions.

Final Thoughts

Borgli learned to manipulate the media early in his career. With a solid understanding of how the tabloid world, headlines, and marketing function, he began passing on this knowledge to his characters — regular people simply yearning for more. But by the time he made his third feature film, Borgli had to simplify. Working with a major studio requires a more conventional approach, and as Dream Scenario flopped at the box office, it’s clear that Borgli may never be asked to play it safe again.

For Borgli, the modern person is someone who craves attention and has millions of ways to get it. The problem is, none of it has any lasting value. It’s cheap, futile traffic — but that doesn’t stop the desire from burning bright.

What sets the Norwegian director apart isn’t that he’s discovered something previously unknown. It’s that he’s genuinely fascinated by something anyone with an internet connection can relate to. And yet, after a wave of desktop horror (in the vein of Insidious: Online), films about webcam model clones (Web Cam Girl), and the infamous series Black Mirror, Borgli emerges as a director unafraid to make comedies about what’s intrinsically funny.

But no matter what, Borgli will always have an audience — the daydreamers who linger for an extra ten minutes in their minds, interviewing themselves. And chances are, Borgli does that too.

Volume 29, Issue 3-5 / May 2025 Film Reviews   comedy   kristoffer borgli   norwegian cinema