‘Cute’ San Sebastián Review: Marlene Emilie Lyngstad’s Unsettling Debut Confronts Desire, Denial, and Discomfort

A risky, complicated film that could stir up some controversy in the New Directors section where it’s premiering, Cute is —no need to dance around it— a portrait of a man sexually attracted to underage girls, locked in a battle against himself, against his own desires. And what unfolds across this uncomfortable Norwegian-Danish co-production is exactly that: his efforts, not always successful, to fight off this terrible compulsion.

This is also a film that doesn’t shy away from scenes ranging from unpleasant to outright uncomfortable. And while it never quite tips into extreme territory, it more than once ventures into ground that many viewers would rather avoid. The debut feature from Marlene Emilie Lyngstad centers on Richard (Jan Gunnar Røise), who’s in a relationship with a woman but seems far more interested in spending his time playing with her daughter, with whom he has a close bond.

But the man wastes little time admitting to himself what’s happening to him, and after seeing a psychiatrist, he ends the relationship. That’s when he returns to his family home, where his mother —gravely ill— still lives, and stays on, spending his days renovating the place with plans to sell it. While there, he meets Stella (Gina Jaqueline), the woman looking after his mother —a young woman who, we’ll soon discover, leads a double life as a virtual cam girl. And her «character» in that fiction is a little girl, Lolita-style.

Cute goes on to trace the relationship between the two of them and the back-and-forth of a story that, at times, seems to «serve» Richard as a way of managing his darkest, most perverse desires without straying into legally and morally thornier territory. But Stella soon realizes that Richard is especially drawn to her «infantilized» persona, and starts to doubt —perhaps to suspect— his true desires and intentions.

Needless to say, Lyngstad has no qualms about digging into the relationship between the two of them —she is an adult, after all, whatever «character» she’s playing— and afterward doubles down even further, in a string of scenes that, to my mind, are excessive and could well have gone unfilmed. While the director is careful to keep the most uncomfortable moments off-screen, Cute can be persuasive enough to pass along to the viewer the same discomfort Stella herself begins to feel at a certain point.

Cute belongs to that group of films —like Carlos Vermut’s Manticore or Ulrich Seidl’s Sparta— that wade into thorny, provocative territory without keeping quite enough distance from it. It may not be as uncomfortable as those two, and it helps, to some degree, to know it was directed by a woman, but this is the kind of proposition bound to unsettle some viewers. The film is both sympathetic and critical at once, especially once its gaze aligns with Stella’s, as she begins to glimpse the truth of the situation. But even with its sharper observations, it remains a somewhat unnecessary provocation. The shots often say more than the directors themselves seem to realize.