Marlene Emilie Lyngstad’s CUTE is hard to watch. Premiering in the New Directors section at the San Sebastian International Film Festival, it takes on one of the most disturbing subjects imaginable without trying to soften it for the audience. What surprised me most, however, is how much of the story is really about loneliness, shame and the desperate need to be close to another person, even when that need takes the characters somewhere very dark.

Richard (Jan Gunnar Røise) leaves his girlfriend after developing sexual feelings for her seven-year-old daughter, Ea (Molly Kirk Rasmussen), and returns to his childhood home, where he keeps himself busy renovating the property before it is sold. There he meets Stella (Gina Jaqueline), the caregiver looking after his mother, and soon discovers that away from her ordinary working life she creates sexualised online content built around a deliberately childlike image. Their relationship becomes increasingly difficult to define, with Richard drawn towards something in Stella that connects directly to what he is trying to suppress, while Stella finds in him the care and attention she appears to be searching for herself. It is an uncomfortable set-up, and it is meant to be.

Richard could easily have become a character described entirely by the word “paedophile”, but Lyngstad and Røise chose not to make him that simple. He is polite, educated, well-dressed and constantly doing something useful, whether cooking, renovating or looking after somebody, and there is nothing about his appearance that tells us what is going on inside his head. That ordinariness is important because it takes away the comfortable distance of presenting someone with these feelings as an obvious monster whom we can immediately recognise and dismiss.

Røise is excellent as Richard, playing him as a very troubled man who is trying to live with a part of himself he wishes wasn’t there. Richard is uncomfortable with himself and you can see how hard he is trying to live as a decent person while carrying something he knows most people would find impossible to accept. For the film, Lyngstad spoke to people who experience paedophilic attraction but say they would never harm a child, and that research helped the way Richard was written.

Stella is the more fascinating of the two; Gina Jaqueline gives her confidence but also a vulnerability that slowly comes through. Stella has built an exaggerated version of “cute” femininity that she sells online, from the clothes she wears to the way she behaves, yet behind it is a woman who wants attention, affection and someone to look after her. She also knows she cannot stay young forever, and that the image she makes money from has an expiry date. Lyngstad developed Stella through research into adult age-play and initially brought Jaqueline on as a consultant before casting her in the role.

The title becomes more interesting once we see what Stella has built around herself. “Cute” sounds innocent, but here innocence can be performed, sold and desired by adults, especially online, where childhood aesthetics and adult sexuality can sit uncomfortably close together.

Richard and Stella eventually create something resembling a father-daughter relationship, although that description never quite fits. Affection, sex, shame and dependency all become tangled together, and there are moments of closeness between them followed by others that are uncomfortable, especially because we know what Richard has spent years trying to control. Stella, however, is never simply there to serve his story; she needs something from him too, and both are playing versions of themselves – Richard has learnt how to appear ordinary, while Stella makes money by performing innocence.

For a first feature, Lyngstad has chosen an incredibly difficult subject. She previously won the top prize in Cannes’ La Cinef section for her graduation film Norwegian Offspring, and with CUTE she once again shows little interest in comfortable stories. The film understands that showing a taboo is not the same as defending it, and while it can be difficult to watch at times, it is definitely worth seeing.

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Written by Maggie Gogler

Featured image © Thomas Dyrholm

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